This is an
extract from a piece written by Martin Empson and
first published at Monthly Review
This
historical emphasis on our changing relationship with the natural world is not
unique to Marxism, or even to the left. The great Whig historian G. M.
Trevelyan believed that among other things, social history must be concerned
with “the attitude of man to nature.” Colonial encounters between Europeans and
indigenous populations of the Americas offer a vivid—and bloody—illustration of
these changing attitudes. These interactions were, on the whole, enormously
destructive for the people and ecology of the Americas. Millions died from
disease or military conquest, communities and civilizations were destroyed, and
many thousands were enslaved. Despite some European migrants’ vision of a land
free from hierarchy and exploitation, the so-called New World rapidly came
under the rule of capitalist social relations. A corresponding change occurred
in the ways people understood the land and used its resources.
In her
classic book Myths of Male Dominance, the anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock
studied the changing social structures of the Montagnais-Naskapi people of
Canada after the arrival of the French fur trade in the seventeenth century.
The Montagnais were an egalitarian, matrilocal society of hunter-gatherers, and
their social relations were governed by “generosity, cooperation, and
patience…those who did not contribute their share were not respected, and it
was a real insult to call a person stingy.” Despite the upheavals the
Montagnais had endured, Leacock still found vestiges of a quite different
social organization during her twentieth-century fieldwork:
As far as I could see, decision-making
on such important issues was a most subtle process—indeed an enigma to the
fieldworker schooled in competitive hierarchies—whereby one found out how
everybody concerned felt without committing oneself until one was fairly sure
in advance that there would be common agreement. I was constantly struck by
the…continual effort…to operate together unanimously…in the direction of the
greatest individual satisfaction without direct conflict of interest.
The Jesuit
missionaries who accompanied the fur traders to Canada were horrified by
Montagnais life, and set about trying to “civilize” the tribe. Within a decade,
the old order began breaking down, as the economic base of Montagnais society
was transformed. The European market for fur was enormous, and to meet this
insatiable demand, traders offered the Montagnais and other indigenous peoples
European goods in exchange for tens of thousands of pelts. The communities
around the trading stations consequently grew dependent on French tools,
weapons, clothing, and food. Filling French orders for fur meant that the
Montagnais ceased to be hunters who spent large parts of the year travelling
long distances; they instead became sedentary trappers. The collective,
collaborative experience of hunting gave way to a more individualistic one,
with single people managing traps and reaping the rewards. Before the
Europeans’ arrival, the Montagnais had no notion of private property; now the
land was divided into individually owned lots. Social relations changed too:
under pressure from the Jesuits, the patriarchal European model of family life
came to dominate, as women were forced out of their role as producers and men
took on the primary task of trapping.
Similar
changes occurred everywhere European traders went, as John F. Richards notes in
his study of the commodification of animals. For instance, “although the Creeks
adapted quickly and successfully to the new incentives of the deerskin trade,
they…faced a basic contradiction. Economic and political forces made it
imperative that they deliver a maximal number of deer skins every year. They
became market hunters linked into the world market who used muskets to avidly
pursue as many deer and bear as possible.”
It is
important not to romanticize the life of indigenous peoples before European
arrival, lest we slip into old tropes of “noble savages” living in perfect
harmony with nature. As Richards notes, evidence exists that in pre-contact
times, Native Americans faced with an abundance of prey would kill more animals
than they needed, to ensure they got the choicest food.
But this
hardly compares with the scale of the slaughter of animals driven by European
demand for fur and skins. As Richards puts it: “Once Indians were touched by the
stimulus of market demand, any restraints they had previously maintained eroded
rapidly. Pursuit of the material rewards offered by the fur traders forced
Indians to hunt preferred species steadily, despite declining numbers…. What
they became were commercial hunters caught up in the all-consuming market.”
The
transformation in attitudes toward nature that followed European arrival in the
Americas mirrors that which accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe. Keith
Thomas has pointed out that in Tudor and Stuart times, “the long established
view was that the world had been created for man’s sake and that other species
were meant to be subordinate to his wishes and needs.”
The
separation of the people from the soil, one of the “original sources of
wealth,” was a protracted and brutal one. Rural producers were turned into wage
labourers. Many were pushed off the land into the growing towns and cities;
others were forced to emigrate, often to the frontiers of capitalism in the New
World. The remainder lost their traditional rural role, becoming wage labourers,
as Marx recognized:
The immediate producer, the worker,
could dispose of his own person only after he had ceased to be bound to the
soil and ceased to be the slave or serf of another person…the historical
movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears on the one
hand as their emancipation from serfdom…. But on the other, these newly freed
men became sellers of themselves only after they have been robbed of all their
own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the
old feudal arrangements.
This new
primacy of private property had to be enforced, and in England, Parliament
enacted hundreds of new laws to encourage further enclosure and limit shared
use of land. Such legislation was needed, as E. P. Thompson noted, because
“property was not, in 1700, trenched around on every side by capital statutes.”
Thompson referred specifically to the notorious 1723 Black Act, which
criminalized unauthorized “hunting, wounding or stealing of red or fallow deer
[in a forest, common lands, or Royal Park], and the poaching of hares, conies
or fish.” The law imposed capital punishment on those found guilty of poaching.
As the great
agricultural trade unionist Joseph Arch noted, the act and other anti-poaching
laws went beyond protecting private property to alter the ways that people used
the country’s natural resources:
We labourers do not believe hares and
rabbits belong to any individual, not anymore than thrushes or blackbirds do….
To see hares and rabbits running across his path is a very great temptation to
many a man who has a family to feed…so he may kill a hare or a rabbit when it
passes his way, because his wages are inadequate to meet the demands on them,
or from dire necessity, or just because he likes jugged hare as well as anybody
else.
The Black Act
was part of “making the world safe for English merchants and landlords to
increase in wealth and so to contribute to the new power of the English state.”
As in the
Americas—though with far less bloodshed—such changes transformed social
attitudes toward nature. Henry Best was an English yeoman farmer who saw his
land triple in value through a process of enclosure in the mid-1600s. The
author of several works on improved agricultural methods, Best had developed
his own system for selling animals at optimal prices. All of this made him
“intolerant” of the remaining communal traditions among his fellow villagers, and
he refused to contribute to the shared hay stock for winter because “our hay
would have been spent in feeding other men’s animals.” Best worked vigorously
to ensure that other farmers’ animals did not stray onto his land, even keeping
watch in the middle of the night. Deliberately isolating himself from his
neighbours, Best represented an early case of the classic capitalist small
landholder, driven by the desire to maximize his own profits at the expense of
the wider community.
The parcelling
up of the land in effect created private property where there was none before,
and new restrictions on the use of nature by rural populations formed a
foundational part of the new capitalist order, managed and protected by the
state. As historian George Yerby writes, “the land was being pinned down, set
at a conceptual distance, captured on the page and assessed in theory, rather
than simply worked as a continuous, unbroken physical exercise.”
Light Shining
in Buckinghamshire, an anonymous pamphlet circulated by the Diggers in 1648,
complained bitterly of the rapid spread of enclosure:
All the Land, Trees, Beasts; Fish,
Fowle, &c. are inclosed into a few mercinary hands; and all the rest
deprived and made their slaves, so that if they cut a Tree for fire they are to
be punished, or hunt a fowle it is imprisonment, because it is gentlemens game,
as they say; neither must they keep Cattle, or set up a House, all ground being
inclosed, without hyring leave for the one, or buying room for the other, of
the chief incloser, called the Lord of the Manor, or some other wretch as cruel
as he.
These changes
provoked spirited resistance. Anti-enclosure movements threw down fences and
hedges, and riots broke out in protest of new land laws. Massed bands of
poachers confronted armed gamekeepers in set-piece battles, and communities
fought in the courts, in the streets, and in the fields to protect their shared
interests. Later the rise of agricultural unions moved the battle away from
violent clashes toward the struggle over wages and working hours, but riots and
protests were for decades the principal form of mass outrage at what was being
done to common people and their land.
The
“classical case against the open-field and common,” Thompson writes, “was its
inefficiency and wastefulness of time.” He cites a 1795 report complaining that
the rural labourer, “in sauntering after his cattle…acquires a habit of
indolence. Quarter, half and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly lost.
Day labour becomes disgusting.” In Thompson’s view, enclosure and agricultural
improvement were “concerned with the efficient husbandry of the time of the
labour force.” In towns and cities, urban industry had “time discipline” at its
heart, and education served as “training in the ‘habit of industry.’” Workers
in the new factories and workshops had to be broken from their old habits into
new ways of working.
This primary
accumulation of wealth, as Marx called it, laid the basis for the development
of the capitalist system, and severed traditional ties between the people and
the soil, concentrating workers in towns and cities. This process of
urbanization and proletarianization also brought with it a new form of time
discipline, and the use of “reserve armies of the unemployed” to inhibit workers’
struggles against their employers.
All of this
led ultimately to the rise of fossil fuels, which came to dominate British
industry in the nineteenth century. This process was neither automatic nor
speedy. As late as 1800, only eighty-four steam engines powered cotton mills in
England, compared to around a thousand mills run by water. John Robison, a
professor of philosophy and lifelong friend of James Watt, inventor of the
steam engine, complained: “Water is the most common power and indeed the best,
as being the most constant and equable; while wind comes sometimes with greater
violence and at others is totally gone. Mills may also be moved by the force of
steam…but the expense of fuel most undoubtedly prevent this mode of
constructing mills from ever becoming general.”
Nonetheless,
steam engines were adopted eventually, despite the high capital costs of plant
and fuel and the novel engineering needed. One reason was that they freed mill
owners from the natural limits of hydropower; only so many water wheels can be
installed over a particular river, and only in so many suitable locations are
available. Fossil fuels, cheap and abundant, had no such constraints.
But the main
reason that fossil fuels came to dominate capitalist production, as Andreas Malm
argues in his recent book Fossil Capital, is that steam power offered “a ticket
to the town.” Steam meant that industry could now be located in urban areas
where workers disciplined in factory work could be easily hired (and fired). No
longer would factory owners be compelled to build homes, churches, and schools
in remote valleys. Instead, the slums of Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow
became the major sites for mills. In 1833, J. R. McCulloch explained these
developments in the Edinburgh Review: “The work that is done by the aid of a
stream of water is generally as cheap as that which is done by steam, and
sometimes much cheaper. But the invention of the steam-engine has relieved us
from the necessity of building factories in inconvenient situation merely for
the sake of a waterfall. It has allowed them to be placed in the centre of a
population trained to industrious habits.” Marx wrote that the process of
primitive accumulation “conquered the field for capitalist agriculture,
incorporated the soil into capital and created for the urban industries the
necessary supplies of free and right-less proletarians.”
That the
capitalist mode of production transformed human social relations is universally
known, but it served equally to alter the relationship between humanity and
nature. The separation between town and country grew, and the concentration of
people in new and growing urban areas drove the adoption of new technologies
and labour methods. Fossil fuels became the dominant form of energy, further enabling
capital to exploit the workforce. Twenty-first century ecological crisis was
never inevitable, but it became steadily more likely with capitalism’s global
expansion. Understanding the historical processes that gave rise to the
Anthropocene will be a vital weapon in the struggle for a sustainable and just
world.
