PARA-BE

Ok SO first off, what he’s talking about when he mentions the “important—but still too partial—notion of environmental costs” is the fairly common and ubiquitous idea that markets cannot capture everything, and that LACUNA in the information able to be taken in to account in any given market exchange tends to skew tons of markets in to inefficient allocations of resources. Very common externalities, which can be both positive and negative, are the drawbacks to extensive pollution (which are shifted away form the party responsible for the pollution, and the costs socialized on to the general population [like in Flint Michigan]) and the benefits of education (which are difficult to quantify and have effects across multiple sets of exchanges and stuff, so the totality of their benefit would be super difficult to work in to any given exchange). So, because there are these externalities, the markets associated with incentivizing or disincintivizing behavior that leads to either environmentally responsible action on the part of corporations or sufficient investment in education on the part of private individuals regularly either over or under encourage their respective behaviors. This is a big old problem!! It is why even Adam Smith, Founding Father of Terrible Economics, was pretty ok with many examples of government spending, and why many economists just clearly understand the necessity for regulation and subsidies in cases of INEVITABLE SYSTEMATIC MARKET FAILURE. Anyway, the idea of externalities basically means that where markets clear very frequently does not take in to account things that would, ideally, be determinants of exchange value if the markets were functioning efficiently.

This is a very central idea in environmental economics (and lots of environment oriented fields, because it basically tells conservative/reactionary economists “fuck you your own dumb theories DESTROY YOUR GROND LIKE HOW YOU DESTROY THE EARTH’S) and does a lot of work, BUT it doesn’t capture the whole thing! There is ALSO this idea of “invisibilities,” which are also not new but ARE kind of new in the way that this guy talks about!

The basic idea is that there are certain factors of the reproduction of labor-power, so certain things that have to happen for people to be able to work for wages, that are not captured in the wage relationship, but are nevertheless necessary for it to keep existing. These factors don’t produce surplus value for capitalists, because they aren’t waged, but they DO underlie the entire system. AS such, capitalist DO have a vested interest in pushing and producing societiy in ways that make it easy for them to keep existing. Moore uses the example of feminist economics because they’ve been saying this for like 50 years at this point and people still don’t get it, BUT there is a lot of labor, principally but not exclusively done by women, that is absolutely necessary for the reproduction of labor power, that is just not accounted for in how we value things. In fact, it is EXTREMELY frequently explicitly dis-valued and divested of symbolic importance, despite the clear necessity of its execution as work. This is why people were so thrilled about housewife narratives in the 50s, and also with keeping black people thought of as less able/less than human. Both phenomena helped keep wages down, because they made sure that at least part of the effort of reproducing the waged worker was done outside the immediate circuit of the production of surplus value by capitalists. Effectively, this constructs a racism and sexism subsidy, rewarding people who more effectively make use of oppressive social structures to make money. A really good more contemporarily apparent version of this (for people that for some reason deny the continued tragically sprawling edifice of racism and sexism) is the exploitation of undocumented labor in fruit, construction, fast food, and like every other industry that society thinks of as less valuable. Those capitalists profit off of our racism and devaluation, so they aim to keep it around by supporting people like every republican and democrat. Ok maybe not every democrat. But like…….. every democrat.

ANYWAY that labor that is structurally FORECLOSED as valuable but is definitely necessary for work getting’ done is termed by him an “invisibility,” and that’s a super good way to think of it!!! BUT IT DOESN’T STOP THERE

BECAUSE THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT HOW HUMANS AND NATURE AREN’T SEPARATE

And THEN goes in to a description of how another invisibility is contained in the production of natures that we then ALSO devalue!!! So despite nature doing like, a ton of work making a forest or ecosystem of deposit of fossil fuels, and the use/detruction of that complex as a definite costs that takes definite time to recuperate, we treat it like some static thing that we can assume is just done for us! Kind of like how people treated slaves. Or their wives. Or like, every colonial subject. The production of colonies, sexist power dynamics, the modern conception of race, AND the production of nature as lacking value or a cost are all examples of the same process, which is say the production of CHEAPS that can be APPROPRIATED! Remember that word from last time?! It’s an important word I guess.

So, when Moore says… Basically the entire rest of the paragraph, he is giving us a pretty neat description of how nature is NOT just a “tap” we can take from, the proverbial “low hanging fruit,” RIPE for the picking, but that the relationship which kind of forces the RELATION to nature where it APPEARS as a costless, very cheap, devalued fruit to be picked is produced. Which is funny cuz of produce, but not funny because of the systematic production of environmental catastrophe that the dominant paradigm of valuation is structurally unable to deal with, because we all think markets clear for some reason, when in reality they almost never do.

Anyway, these ideas are super cool, and go a long way towards trying to understand how humans and nature co-produce an environment with determinate effects. Without nature’s work, humans couldn’t appropriate the Cheaps, and without explicit human action, in the form of commodification, mapping, geography, the construction of various abstractions, etc. humans could not appropriate nature at the scale that we do!!

AND THAT, is vitally important!!! Because!!! And this is a thing he goes in to more later, but I will gesture towards it now: If we do not appropriate at a rate that exceeds the increase of the variable rate of exploitation, the proportion of value that is paid by CAPITAL will increase!!!! Which reduces the marginal production of surplus value!! Which slows growth!! WHICH PRODUCES CRISIS.

And…. As we will also see later…….. The acts of colonization that produce appropriable relationships are not very reproducible. IN the words of capitalism, they don’t scale, we can’t do them more than once. Colonialism is over, at least in its classical mode. There are no more broad swathes of agriculturally productive land, and our current swathes are becoming less efficient. We have mined much of the earth’s natural resources already, and used them in ways that are very difficult to recuperate.

So anyway, the situation is dire etc. etc. We need COMMUNISM

CLASSIC

BOOK

THAT I READ

“Money is so important in historical capitalism because it is central to three interconnected processes: 1) the carving out of a part of human activity, paid work, and giving it special value; 2) the de-valuing of the rest of nature, so as to put these natures to work for free, or low cost; 3) governing the evolving boundary between capitalization and appropriation, between ‘economy,’ its constitutive relations, and the web of life.”

While the relationship to money that Moore outlines here is certainly not novel, it did produce an effect on my brain!! Before this passage, I never really got the idea that nature HAD to be devalued in order to exist in the way it does, as a “tap” or resource. Like, if we thought of trees as having some value as trees, we would not be able to view them as naked resource to just be primally accumulated. Same with mines and rivers and animals and whatever!! The colonization of our thinking that capitalism effected by producing and instrumental relationship to objects as commodities is STAGGERING. I mean, you learn about commodity fetishism in school, you learn that exchange value is a pure social phenomenon and that price is nothing other than a social relationship, and certainly not “inside” of things in any way and it all seems obvious, like blah blah blah DUH, but the REAL significance of it, the fundamental violence done to our subjective ability to interact with the world in a way not mediated BY commodities and BY price, is super difficult to see. And very very very pernicious!! Like, nature doesn’t have a price, but it also doesn’t NOT have one. The price phenomenon is a social relationship; a value we place on the objects and environments and factors around us. It says that we think those things are WORTH something, that we should protect them, etc. By failing to see that the operation of money, exchange, and price implicitly values even the things it tries not to touch, we open ourselves up to the colonial violence of basic appropriation. Capitalism ONLY values what is in side of it, and by trying to posit an outside we end up creating a frail exterior basically designed to be dominated as soon as it can be profitably.

This is like the whole gesture of the book!!! Capitalism not only produces surplus value through exploiting wage workers, but ALSO underwrites that surplus value with the systematic eradication of other ways of being. IT’S VERY BAD. It’s like if someone says “this is priceless” capital is like… FOR NOW and then proceeds to spend a long time making sure it can eventually access it when its other inputs have gotten too expensive. Like, when labor is really cheap, sure we’ll rely on that forever, we can get tons of “surplus value” just through PEASANTS!! But then class struggle happens (apparently there was a peasant war in German in the 16th century!??!?!?!) and now it’s too expensive, so instead of working together qualitatively, we PIVOT and decide, hey, this forest, its worthless shite! And then because it’s free to cut down a tree, we can effectively subsidize the whole process, resulting in basically free surplus for whoever can effectively coerce the efficient functioning of appropriating nature. And when that gets too expensive, due to scarcity or whatever, we pivot in to tools. When those are too expensive, we pivot into commodifying basic information (DIGITAL LABOR) etc. etc. etc. OOF.

“Humans simultaneously create and destroy environments (as do all species), and our relations are therefore simultaneously—if differentially through time and across space—being created and destroyed with and by the rest of nature. Through this optic, nature’s status undergoes a radical shift: a transition from nature as resource to nature as matrix. Nature can be neither destroyed nor saved, only reconfigured in ways that are more or less emancipatory, more or less oppressive. But take note: our terms ‘emancipatory’ and ‘oppressive’ are offered not from the standpoint of humans narrowly, but through the oikeios, the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humans and the rest of nature. AT stake now—perhaps in a more salient way than ever before in the history of our species—is exactly this: emancipation or oppression not from the standpoint of humanity and nature, but from the perspective of humanity-in-nature…and nature-in-humanity.” (Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore, p. 48-49)

Kind of obvious caveat: The complications are not insurmountable, just not presently surmounted as of right now in chapter 1 lolol.

Anyway the main GRIPE that’s difficult to come to GRIPS with for me is the idea of how we are to understand this like, pan-active notion of oppression and emancipation. From a human standpoint, it’s kind of easy (though more complex than it seems) and can be stated as something superficial like “people being able to do what they want more than not” or whatever. Obviously that definition could use some nuance and has tons of complications and there are zero-sum-games that make it messy and yada yada, BUT the central intuition that underlies it, where we posit some kind of central agency that has desires that are ascribable to it that power can either enhance or diminish (through emancipation/friendship vs. coercion), holds up ok. However! It is decidedly human centric. It DEFINITELY presupposes these things/entities whose motivations and desires we can communicate in some meaningful way. It ALSO presupposes a somewhat equal playing filed, where all humans are pretty similar to each other, and have reciprocal ethical relationships and stuff. Each human can basically understand each other human (to a degree), and we can say stuff like “that person doesn’t want to die that way” with reasonable certainty. And then, we don’t have to kill them!

Bottom line is, we don’t have to eat each other to live, but we do have to eat nature. And! We have scaled ourselves to such a degree that our eating of nature DEFINITELY entails a forced organization of nature so that it is more useful to us as humanity. This is super clear in like, industrial agriculture and GMOs and stuff, but even goes back to things like corn we can eat and non-poisonous bananas. And dogs. While there is a version of humans-in-nature that, according to contemporary narratives about those two things that we think of as super distinct, is like some kind of primal Eden of inter-species inter-conceptual Good for all parties, it is very difficult to imagine in the present historical circumstances.

When thinking about humans, it’s pretty clear that the past injustices of slavery were wrong, and that we should make some kind of attempt to redress the historical injustice and create some facsimile of a level playing field if we want any HOPE of ending oppression. However, for plants, animals, and minerals, it’s a way more complicated field. There the basic fact that we sometimes destroy individual entities of each of the above classes in the course of our day to day existence. There is the more complicated historical organization of their existence for human ends. And then there is the nigh-impossible question of how to interpret whatever communication we can glean from all these sources.

Potential ways out of this APORIA probably resolve around thinking some kind of state of existence where each of our functioning selves are allowed to FLOURISH and we can exist in a way that is not just using each other for our own ends with no regard for the other. Eating fruit and grains, for instance, is not really a big deal. Also, eating animals to some degree is just kinda how nature is. But, it invites the inevitable question, which doesn’t really get easier to answer, of nature’s desire, nature’s ideal life, the GOOD of nature. It invites the idea of what justice would look like when we can’t communicate with the Other (which is a pretty good question lololol considering the nature of human communication), what justice looks like when we have already been SO thoroughly unjust as to make some kind of originary “just” state purely mythical, and what our responsibility is for literal millennia of exploitative history.

               So Proust is the best, and this passage comes at the end of a really long lingering with various stages and states of sleep. They are all very specific, and, as usual, linked to memory and habit and other such thematic topics for the guy. It is consistently extremely impressive to me how thorough and detailed Proust can be, especially about states that are like, intrinsically elusive. Like the feeling you have in a “leaden sleep,” that is composed both of the lead feeling you currently feel, the position towards the future contained by being “glad to be dragged, a little later, heavy, overfed,” etc., AND the having-fallen in to the “pit.” It is a concept that is only constituted retroactively, like you can only identify it as a thing that you have already come out of, because gladness to be dragged is PART of the concept, and in the MOMENT, before it is a retroactive-thing, the feeling or state of sleep could pivot in to several other feelings or stages of sleep. And yet!! It’s such a specific and nuanced description that can’t help but map on to actual lived life… It’s weirdly abstract but at the same time super particular. THAT’S POETIC LANGUAGE I GUESS. Anyway, the way that Proust consistently balances within the ambiguity of phrases and states and ways of knowing is probably the most affective aspect of his use of language. For me at least. His vocabulary is stunningly huge, blah blah blah, but the REAL thing that gets me is how the future, past and an evoked present are stitched together in ways that tug at my interior life, even across CENTURIES. HE GETS ME (lololololol) That’s incredible. That’s the WORTH OF THE PROUST or whatever.

               AND the fact that these two little paragraphs contain so much specificity-in-abstraction, so many thematic moments and specifically Proust-ian concept constructions are why I like this passage so much!

The first part gets at the interwoven sense of history and life trajectory that is so thoroughly present in Proust with an example, and then the second part just like, leverages it towards these crazy epistemological and ontological possibilities. Like, the dreamy sleep states he’s been describing are both general and specific and necessarily temporal, but then he just goes and totally complicates and problematizes those feelings and states by pointing out that, because they are phenomena of history, with pasts evoked and presents fleetingly passing and futures assumed, the fact that they consistently coalesce in a way that we “recognize” in an identity is like, a super contingent fact, and so loosely tied to our experience of consciousness as the be almost entirely secondary!? Like this is such a prescient deconstruction of mind/body dualism and individuality as the only standard of experience! And it just comes out of left field. If our identity is only created (and created anew every morning) by these involuntary chains of memory associations, what place does the agency we traditionally ascribe to conscious thought really have? That agency dies every time we go to sleep! Every sleep is like, this absolute risk, and the fact that such a quotidian HAPPENSTANCE is in reality, if we look at it and reflect and try to get inside of ourselves, contingent upon being able to latch on to something and evoke a ton of involuntary chains of associations, what if those associations were connected to something else? What if we latch on to an element we never saw before, and we become someone totally different? The idea that our self is in some way static or consistent and under our control in any meaningful is revealed by sleep, for Proust at least, as an ILLUSION!! Or at best only created by Habit. And yet Proust hates Habit! Because it removes all novelty and attention and specificity from experience!!!!!