Nature's Evil

NINE

Labour and the Mercantile Pump

Mercantilists believed that the main goal of trade was the accumulation of gold in the state coffers. The population was of secondary importance. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, England seemed to be overpopulated, and the politicians were pleased by the emigration of the surplus population to America. Conducted by private individuals, trade always needed the backing of the state. British trade on the oceans would have been impossible without the Royal Navy protecting merchant ships from enemies and pirates. But the Royal Navy was equally dependent on the merchant fleet: commercial vessels were the training ground for sailors. The strength of the state lay in the wealth of the Treasury, which depended on the strength of the state.

The benefit of colonies

In the era of mercenary armies, it was probably true that gold would help in the event of a war or other crisis. Even though wars were financed by loans rather than by the Treasury, the interest did depend on the gold reserves. In order to accumulate gold, the Treasury needed a positive trade balance, with exports exceeding imports. Every single exchange was a transaction between private individuals, but a highly placed regulator – in England, it was Parliament – could control the balance of trade by restraining internal consumption, checking imports and incentivising exports. Colonies should not compete with the mother country but benefit her by providing raw materials, absorbing her excess population and buying her goods. The volume of world trade was considered finite: what went to one competitor left another empty-handed. As the turnover in these exchanges increased, the tax base of the empire also increased. More gold ended up in the Treasury.

External partners were unreliable: trade with them was at risk from wars, diplomatic failures and arbitrary tariffs. The more England depended on its own colonies and the less it relied on trade with other empires, the better. Under mercantilist law, all exchanges with the colonies had to go through the mother country; English colonies were discouraged or banned from exchange among themselves. All this was connected with a growing faith in the power of the state. A private merchant was like a sailor steering a sailing ship, but only the sovereign, the captain of the ship, could determine the course of this gigantic machine. The Navigation Acts, which were passed by Parliament in 1651 and remained in force for nearly 200 years, banned foreign ships from carrying commodities from English colonies and permitted the colonies to trade their raw materials exclusively via English ports. Creating a transport cartel, the Navigation Acts caused the prices of colonial commodities to rise. As a result, sugar from the French colonies was much cheaper than British sugar, which enabled the French to capture most of the European market. British industry suffered from the Navigation Acts, but the merchant fleet and shipowners benefited from them, prompting Adam Smith to write that power over the world belonged not to the producers of commodities but to their carriers.

The historian Klaus Knorr outlined the arguments in support of the colonies expressed in Parliament and in the press: they were needed for the conversion of savages; without colonies sailors wouldn’t get training; the empire needed deposits of gold and silver; the metropole needed to get rid of its surplus population; and, finally, colonies increased the state’s revenue. 1 The most frequent argument in favour of colonies was that their raw materials were vital for the British economy. British imports during this period included four categories: ships’ rigging and other ‘marine supplies’ and potash from Russia and the Baltic lands; salt, wine, dried fruits, silk, sugar and tobacco from Southern Europe; spices, cloth and dyes from the Far East; and dried or pickled fish from the Atlantic. Some of these goods were luxury items, and these imports could be stopped if necessary. Others were vital for England, though attempts were made to find substitutes from British colonies. Around 1700, Parliament was constantly discussing the fact that England’s enemies controlled the supply of vitally important raw materials. In case of war, such dependence could have fatal consequences. For example, Sir Gilbert Heathcote said in the House of Lords in 1721: ‘while we fetch’d our naval Stores from Russia, it was in the Power of the Czar, not only to set what Price he pleas’d upon them, but even to prevent our having them at all.’ 2 The politicians hoped that extracting raw materials from the colonies would solve this problem. America was thought of by analogy with India: the English needed to establish trading stations there, and the ‘Red Indians’ would supply pelts, hemp, fish, timber and other necessities in exchange for the products of British industry.

Only some of these hopes were realised, but the English succeeded in expanding the American colonies on a scale that could hardly have been imagined in the original plans. The population of the colonies grew much more quickly than the population of the British Isles. The income of the white settlers was higher than earnings in England, and consumption in the colonies was also growing fast. The hopes for an influx of gold into the Treasury were not fulfilled. Charles Davenant calculated that only a quarter of the English revenue came from the export of domestic items such as wool and tin; everything else came from the two Indias. Davenant wrote that ‘Colonies are a Strength to their Mother Kingdom, while they are under good discipline … But otherwise, they are worse than Members lopp’d from the Body Politic.’ Moreover, if the mercantilist Navigation Acts were breached, ‘our own Plantations may become more profitable to our Neighbours, than to us.’ British colonies were not sufficiently profitable in peacetime and were not sufficiently reliable in wartime, wrote Davenant. 3 He thought that, while the sugar islands were useful for the empire, the colonies of North America only swallowed up resources. Sir William Petty, one of the founders of the Royal Society, proposed resettling American colonists in Ireland. According to another theorist, Malachy Postlethwayt, ‘it is a law founded on the very nature of the colonies, that they ought to have no culture or arts.’ 4

But history is uncanny. Colonies did have cultures, and this is exactly what made them disloyal and unreliable, if not unprofitable. It took about a century for the Dutch to do away with the Habsburg Empire, but it required much more time for them to leave their own colonies. However, the relatively peaceful trade with the Baltic lands gave the Dutch merchants greater profit than trade with both Indias. Having won their independence from the British, the Americans promoted free trade as one of their revolutionary principles. They also applied this regime to the slave trade. It was the British who led the Abolitionist movement.

Two monopolies

Trade in natural resources gave rise to the urban boom that defined the face of Europe. Roman cities had developed from fortified camps in strategic places. In contrast, the towns of modern Europe grew up where natural conditions offered convenient places for ships to berth or waterwheels to turn. Cosmopolitan centres of long-distance trade and early industry, such towns were outposts of global exchange. Indifferent to the surrounding lands and villages, many of these cities were built where the land was still unoccupied because of the risk of floods or pirate attacks – on deltas and marshland, near fords and dams. In the twenty-first century some of these cities will be the first victims of global warming.

An example of such a city, a part of the great world that fitted uneasily into the local space, is Glasgow. It had a convenient port, abundant timber, huge wharfs and an excellent university. Tobacco was Glasgow’s main product. In 1752, when Adam Smith became a professor of moral philosophy, Glasgow was processing more tobacco than all the English ports put together. 5 Scottish merchants avoided competition by buying tobacco from small farmers at flexible prices (the English preferred to buy from large plantations at fixed contracts). Moreover, the Scots were old hands at avoiding British duties – or, in other words, smuggling. But the tobacco traders actively collaborated with the authorities, and in due course they became the authorities. From 1740 to 1790, every mayor of Glasgow owned a tobacco firm. Like any transatlantic business, the tobacco trade was full of risks; it needed financial acumen and capital, and also trust in Providence. Banks, insurance offices and Presbyterian churches developed alongside the wharves and factories.

The union between Scotland and England had happened in 1707, and Adam Smith started a meandering career that was typical for an intellectual from the colonies. After finishing school in Kirkcaldy and completing a degree at the University of Glasgow, he went to imperial Oxford. He didn’t like it there and returned to Glasgow to teach moral philosophy. Apart from his involvement with the university administration, Smith had no business experience. He picked up knowledge of the world in clubs and coffeehouses, where the professors consumed the addictive fruits of colonial trade in the company of sea captains and manufacturers. After many years of teaching Scottish students, he agreed to take up a position as tutor in a family of English aristocrats. Later, Smith, a firm supporter of free trade, became a member of the Scottish Customs Committee.

His celebrated book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is constructed like an optical instrument that gradually shifts its focus from the most minute details of the local economy to the panorama of global trade. Every value is created by labour. The wealth of a country can only be created by the labour of its people. The division of labour is the key to the wealth of nations. In a Scottish workshop Smith had observed the eighteen operations that were needed to make a pin – a shiny little item made of pure steel. On the receiving end of the same trade, the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin described how the wealthy connoisseurs of St Petersburg relished the fruits of British industry:

Whatever clever London offers

For those with lavish whims and coffers,

And ships to us by Baltic seas,

In trade for tallow and for trees …

Steel files and combs in many guises,

Straight scissors, curved ones, thirty sizes

Of brushes for the modern male –

For hair and teeth and fingernail.

Eugene Onegin, the ‘modern male’ depicted in this Russian verse novel, read Adam Smith while sauntering between other fashionable preoccupations. 6 In contrast, the workers in London or Glasgow who made all these pins and scissors were trained to repeat one and the same operation many times a day. The manufacturers protected their commercial secrets so that their products would not be copied elsewhere, though one of them did demonstrate his eighteen operations to Smith. As long as such secrets were not cracked, these masters kept their temporary monopolies and the workers kept their jobs.

Significantly, Smith does not tell us where the steel to make the pin came from. Glasgow had its own ore, but there is a good chance that iron bars came to Glasgow across the sea from Sweden or Russia. The rarer a raw material, the less its price reflects the labour expended on it, because it is then a product of monopoly. But this monopoly of extraction is very different from a monopoly of knowledge: the former is enduring, the latter temporary. Trading in raw materials, monopolistic companies owned cargo vessels, ports, canals, wharves; they were protected by naval warships; and they were the dominating influence in the establishment of prices, taxes and duties. According to Smith, the mercantile system preferred the interests of producers over the interests of consumers, and all those interests were sacrificed in favour of the merchant seafarers. Hobbes saw the state as a clumsy landlubber. Smith returned to Leviathan its initial meaning of a sea monster.

In Smith’s optimistic view of the markets, monopoly was an aberration, an improper and temporary deviation. He did not create a sound theory of monopoly; this honour fell to Bentham. Monopoly allowed great fortunes to be created, but over time the invisible hand would eliminate all these undeserved advantages. This regularly happened to commercial secrets – the key to the success of small manufacturing monopolies. Labour is based on knowledge; this knowledge spreads unevenly, but competition smooths out these differences. However, most powerful monopolies were built not on commercial secrets but, rather, on the means of transportation. Smith describes how quarries on the outskirts of London produced a good profit but in Scotland made no income at all. The same went for forestry: in the south of England regular felling was profitable; in Scotland trees were left to rot. Coal mines near Oxford were lucrative, but in Scotland many mines remained idle. All these examples had nothing to do with commercial secrets – they are closer to Pushkin’s ‘tallow and trees’ than to Smith’s pins. Producing sophisticated devices such as pins, Scotland was losing bigger money on its natural riches, because the distances were long, transportation was expensive, and the resources were diffused.

Smith’s magisterial idea of free trade was devised to overcome the hostile principle of monopoly. The ‘invisible hand’ was improving the valuable products of labour, but its relation to the rare fruits of nature remained unclear. Smith believed in labour and did not appreciate nature – neither the romantic Scottish lochs and mountains which would become fashionable among the next generation nor the tropical islands with their tobacco and sugar. Trade in such things meant the power of the monopoly and unearned profits for merchants and shopkeepers. For the same reason, Smith had nothing to say about coal: as a fuel for stoves, firewood was healthier, he wrote. Unlike Cantillon, who was much more forward-looking, Smith couldn’t see any other future for coal. But the Industrial Revolution had already begun in Glasgow; Smith and the inventor of the steam engine, James Watt, were friends.

Coal and ore were available nearby; some mines around Glasgow already had more than a hundred workers, and they would have a great future. But Smith wrote that the mining business was a lottery. Looking at the fluctuations in silver prices in Europe, he compared them to the prices for grain. In every stage of development, the price of grain is the measure of labour. The price of silver, on the other hand, is not connected with labour; it is unpredictable and therefore not truly relevant. Whether new mines opened or old ones closed, civilisation would neither improve nor deteriorate. Spanish wealth, based on precious metals, was not productive, wrote Smith. Spain remained as poor as Poland, although the former had income from American mines while the latter did not. He didn’t mince his words when he denied any significance to overseas treasure which belonged to another empire and was not subject to the labour theory of value. As the philosophers of the Enlightenment focused on the vices of the Catholic world, so Smith demolished Spanish ideas about wealth. ‘The most abundant mines … could add little to the wealth of the world,’ he said. 7

Undivided labour

For many centuries, almost every human lived on subsistence farming. While economic growth and long-distance trade were developing in the coastal enclaves of the Atlantic civilisation, the silent majority of subsistence farmers remained separate from them. Describing this long-standing coexistence, the historian Fernand Braudel wrote: ‘Thus we have two universes, two ways of life foreign to each other, yet whose respective wholes explain one another.’ All this changed when the things extracted or made by the peasant, the fisherman, the miner turned into tradable goods. Expanding capitalism was ‘gradually creating the world in which we live, and, at that early date, prefiguring our world.’ 8

First, a peasant came to the market in the nearest town to sell eggs or a chicken, so that he could pay his rent or buy an iron tip for his plough. He could earn extra doing odd jobs, and he might end up as a chimney sweep. But he could also become a trader, selling goods made by other people. Our peasant could perform these tasks sequentially – for example, he could plough in spring, weave baskets in summer, and trade in winter. Then, however, came the time of specialisation: those who concentrated not just on a one-and-only trade but on a one-and-only operation within this trade were more competitive. Adam Smith says that the experienced country blacksmith could produce a hundred nails in a day, but a trained youth who has done nothing in his life except make nails could produce 2,300 in a day. One person could probably make a couple of pins in a day, but, thanks to the division of labour, ten people could make 48,000 pins in a day. The division of labour led to the adoption of machines which could carry out simple and repetitive operations quicker than people. The simplest woollen coat ‘is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser.’ 9 Someone had to make shears, and Smith produces a new list of all the trades involved in that task. One should also add here the merchants, drivers and seamen – they deliver the products from one group of workers to another by water or overland. But then also the shipbuilders, sail-makers, carpenters and blacksmiths who make the carts, stables, vessels and carriages. ‘What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen!’ Moreover, this great machine of labour and supply would not work without a financial system – accounts, lines of credit and money. Markets and banks, courts of law and, finally, the goverment are all needed for this purpose. This whole elaborate system is built on the division of labour. In Smith’s version, the political economy constructed a chain from the coarse woollen coat right up to Parliament, with the lord chancellor sitting on the Woolsack – a ladder leading from the division of labour to the separation of powers.

But Smith realised that the division of labour is characteristic more of industry than of agriculture. The carpenter rarely does the work of a locksmith, but on a farm the ploughman is also a shepherd, a builder and a coach driver. This is why, explained Smith, agriculture is not subject to such improvement as industry. For Smith, this is a gigantic difference. Labour without specialisation is unproductive, neglectful, lazy. Switching from one sort of work to another, ‘a man commonly saunters a little … When he first begins the new work … his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for sometime he rather trifles than applies to good purpose.’ 10 This ‘sauntering’ is the secret of the low productivity of the peasant. Only with the division of labour does the worker leap from the vicious circle of rural idleness on to the straight line of improvement. Specialisation is the high road to progress. But the ‘country workman’ (this was Smith’s term for a peasant) remains immune to specialisation. ‘The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures,’ wrote Smith. ‘It is impossible to separate so entirely the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer as the trade of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith.’ The result is that the peasant is always idle, careless, distracted, sauntering. But why doesn’t his work submit to the law of productivity?

The seasonal character of agricultural work is one explanation. Different tasks have to be done at different times of year. As the seasons change, one and the same person works now at sowing, now at cattle herding, now at sheep shearing, now at harvesting. ‘It is impossible that one man should be constantly employed in any one of them,’ writes Smith. This is the main, albeit annoying ‘reason why the improvement of the productive powers of labour in this art does not always keep pace with their improvement in manufactures.’ More generally, the reason for the non-division of peasant labour is nature’s indifference to men’s desires: people extract from nature just those few parts that meet their needs, but they are still subject to all other whims of nature. People need pins or bread, not spring or autumn. Making pins in a workshop, they can forget about the seasons, but, working in the fields, they have to respect them.

Not every reader shared Smith’s enthusiasm for the division of labour. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘When an artisan is engaged constantly and uniquely in the manufacture of one thing, … each day he becomes more skilful and less industrious, and one can say that the man in him is degraded as the worker is perfected. What should one expect from a man who has used twenty years of his life in making pinheads?’ 11 For Smith, the division of labour was the source of progress, for Tocqueville, a degradation. With his overwhelming interest in labour, Marx believed that its division dehumanises the worker. But, for all practical purposes, Marx was rather ambivalent. Division of labour is crucial for capitalist development but leads to alienation, the source of evil. In the future, men would overcome the division of labour ‘to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.’ 12 But Marx was hardly recommending a return to what he called ‘the idiocy of rural life’.

Both Smith and Marx were able to make valuable – if sometimes dubious – generalisations from an important truth: division cannot be applied to peasant labour. Moreover, it is also inapplicable to many other activities connected with the extraction of raw materials – grain and wool, fish and ore, silk and coal. The division of labour increases as commodities move through the processing system: it is at a minimum in the first stages of the extraction of raw materials and at a maximum in the final stages of the production of goods. In Smith’s example we have already seen this difference: the shepherd watches his flock and shears his sheep while also turning his hand to gardening, driving a coach and many other things. But the sheep’s wool is processed by a social machine which already consists of dozens of separate trades.

Nevertheless, many sorts of specialised work did develop in the villages. Millers and smiths led their own distinct lives. Whether tanners and cobblers followed their trade for one day or six days of the week depended solely on the demand for their services. But they probably all had an orchard and a vegetable patch and houses that needed upkeep. Swedish peasants also worked as miners, English farm labourers as spinners, Russian peasants as road builders, Norwegian peasants as fishermen; and everywhere where cities were being built, peasants worked on building sites.

It was not only shepherds and plough boys who had never heard of the division of labour; specialisation was also unknown to many others who worked professionally in the extraction business, even when their activities experienced impressive growth. The fishermen of Norway and New England didn’t build their ships or make their nets and barrels, but they had to repair all these things. Fishing was seasonal, and fishermen never forgot their agricultural work. English miners hacked coal, cleaned it and packed it in crates; they constructed new galleries, reinforced them and sorted out the ventilation; when necessary, they brought first aid and repaired the machines. In many mines the work was seasonal; when the groundwater rose the miners returned to their kitchen gardens and home trades. The only work that was divided was auxiliary; the coal diggers in the mines were as interchangeable as the sailors on a ship. The Industrial Revolution gave birth to hundreds of new trades – for example, in the smelting and forging of metals. But the work of a miner did not lend itself to much specialisation. Even when assisted by machines, it still required creative responses to changing situations. This is true to a large extent even today. Everything that involves direct contact with nature demands the creative work and undivided attention of a human being.

The division of labour secured the highest achievements of capitalism. Proto-industrialisation developed some primary divisions, but weavers and knitters were also milkmaids, housekeepers and gardeners. It was only in the 1840s that European proto-industries ceded their place to capital-intensive factories with actual division of labour – and the ‘spectre of communism’ has haunted Europe since then. But even professional traders specialised only on the lower rungs of their hierarchy: money changers, shopkeepers, peddlers were specialists, but bankers, merchants and industrialists were more likely to be all-rounders. Capitalism is founded on the division of labour, but capitalists paid it scant attention. We remember the early universalism of Jacob Fugger, but many followed in his footsteps. Braudel portrays the late eighteenth-century entrepreneur Antonio Greppi, who owned a bank in Milan, managed state monopolies in tobacco and salt in Lombardy, and delivered mercury via Vienna to the Spanish king. 13 In Moscow in the seventeenth century, ‘everybody traded’ – the tsar, the boyars, the military, ordinary townsfolk and even monks. Moreover, they traded in everything imaginable. The state tried to distribute shops in logical ‘trade rows’ that could be easily inspected; but, nevertheless, shops in the bakery row also sold milk, crockery and hay, and the butchery rows sold herring and linen. 14 The essence of capitalism is such that specialists are needed only in the minor roles, though these roles turn into mass professions; in the wholesale and financial markets, generalists usually win the fight. Contrary to Smith’s theory, those at the very bottom and the very top of the food chain of capitalism – the peasants and the miners, the entrepreneurs and the financiers – were not concerned with the division of labour into its elementary particles.

No division of labour occurred in subsistence farming; it came only with the market and, wrote Smith, depended on the volume of the market. Going further, Polanyi distinguished between three kinds of trade – local, national and long-distance; all three developed independently of one another. In the towns there were trades, and one such trade was trade itself; many towns, in reality, grew up around markets. But long-distance trade was concentrated in a few ports which followed their own path of development. The routes of distant and local trade intersected there, but the authorities kept them separate. Foreign merchants were not allowed to carry out retail; in exchange, the local rules did not apply to their wholesale trade. According to Polanyi’s formula, the town walls not only protected the local markets and warehouses from external threats but also defended the surrounding countryside from market commerce. Various parts of the Hanseatic League had more in common with each other than with their own people, and they ‘deliberately cut off the hinterland from trade’. They functioned as colonial enclaves in a foreign land; some of them, for example in Novgorod, were called ‘colonies’. The imperial cities that functioned as distribution hubs for long-distance trade – Venice, Amsterdam, Marseilles, St Petersburg – were structured differently. Facing the sea, they often had no walls. The port was defended from possible attacks from the sea, the workforce came from afar or was even driven there by force, but relations with the surrounding population were not so important. In the rural backwaters people continued to live from their smallholdings; as Polanyi put it, the trade maps of Europe in this period ‘leave blank the countryside’.

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

In the chapter called ‘The Labour-Process’, Marx takes a new step. Labour creates a third thing which is neither labour nor matter. Seeking a metaphor which will help the reader understand this process, Marx turns to the idea of William Petty, the early English mercantilist. Labour is the father and the earth is the mother of use-value, quotes Marx from Petty. How to define the process of their intercourse without reverting to ‘fetishism’? Looking for still another metaphor, Marx proposes one that transfers agency from the person to the raw material. The function of matter, for example cotton or coal, is to ‘absorb’ (aufsaugen ) human labour. ‘The raw material serves now merely as an absorbent of a definite quantity of work.’ Yarn, for example, is ‘nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton.’ Labour consumes raw material, nature absorbs labour – this produces a kind of symmetry. In their application to matter and labour, metaphors of ingestion – to devour, absorb, feed on – appeal to Marx more than the idea of sexual intercourse which he found in Petty. It takes six hours of manual labour for a spinner to create 10 pounds of yarn: cotton thus absorbs these hours of work in order to become yarn. Then this yarn absorbs still more hours of work to turn into a coat. In the same way a load of coal absorbs a certain number of hours of a miner’s labour. In commerce, goods interact and multiply. This creates capital, which has a life of its own – it invests and devours, destroys and resurrects, and multiplies again. Marx’s final formula is startling in its splendour: ‘… incorporating living labour with … dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster who begins to “work” as if he has love in his body.’ *

The live monster, the capitalist Leviathan, sends us back to Hobbes. However, does the ruling monster have ‘love in his body’? Are we to understand Marx’s capital as a live but lonely monster that ‘works’ on himself, as if masturbating? Is this solitary but explosive action the secret of the ‘value big with value’? Marx put ‘work’ in quotation marks, and they add a bit of irony to the picture. * The grotesque image of the monster state pleasuring itself, and thus endlessly creating capital, helped Marx to move away from the sentimental ‘mother-nature, father-labour’ model of his predecessors. That model gave too big a role to natural matter, to dead substance and to the finite universe.

Two pumps

The enlightenment of the lower classes, their sweet refinement, gave that stimulus to mass consumption without which capitalism would have been limited to aristocrats exchanging luxury items (see chapters 4 and 8 ). This internal side of the process was crucial. We know a lot about mercantilism as a system of trade relations between empires and colonies; the question is, how did this high policy translate into relationships inside every village, smallholding and, ultimately, family?

The mercantile system led to a major resource crisis – the shift from grain to wool. Polanyi describes how the English state both initiated and tried to slow down this transformation. The poorest of the rural poor received food subsidies that allowed them to survive. Pioneered in 1795, the Speenhamland system was an early version of agricultural subsidy, with the difference that this relief was given to landless labourers. Local parishes distributed aid among the needy. The profit from overseas colonies was redistributed in favour of the English rural poor. This early recognition of the ‘right to live’ resulted in the formation of a class of paupers – people who were deprived of land and didn’t see any point in work. The brightest minds of the era wrote about them; Malthus and Burke were both against subsidy; Bentham suggested replacing it with panoptical workhouses. A market in land could have helped the paupers, but it didn’t yet exist: if the impoverished smallholder could have sold his land the landlords would not have needed to enclose it, and he would have had some money.

Powered by waterwheels and then steam engines, early factories were more productive than ‘cottage industries’. But the Industrial Revolution coexisted with this proto-industry for many decades. 19 Turning the island metropole into a huge factory which imported raw matter and exported goods was the very essence of mercantilism. The central link in this new system was a dynamic mechanism that I call the mercantile pump . This pump translated the requirements of long-distance trade into transformations inside the peasant family. It pumped the water out of commodities, drying them out so that trade turned from the local circulation of raw and perishable products, which could be consumed only on the spot, into the long-distance trade of dry goods. It sucked land and labour out of subsistence farming and pumped it into the production of goods ready for export. It used addictive colonial goods to incentivise rural workers and pump out their work, which was converted into cash crops and the products of cottage industry. Enclosures had deprived the peasants of the land that fed them, but their villages now had colonial stores in which a day’s wages could be exchanged for dry, sweet (or sometimes salty) foreign foods. The mercantile pump replaced the raw with the dry, the local with the imported, the home-made with the shop-bought. Exposing subsistence farming to internal and global markets, the mercantile pump sucked out labour, replacing it with addiction.

The mercantile pump worked like Robert Boyle’s air pump, one of the great achievements of the Royal Society in London in the mid-seventeenth century (see chapter 6 ). Robert Boyle’s father was Richard Boyle, the lord high treasurer of Ireland, who colonised a big part of the country for England. His own plantation in Munster was a model for other developments, and it made him fabulously rich; appointed to the highest office in Ireland, he lent money to the royal family. British plantations in the recently conquered Ireland were created by the same people who founded the colonies in Virginia. The Irish cattle herders drove huge herds of horned beasts from one pasture to another, a tradition that was not far from the transhumance of sheep in Spain. The English did not need this perishable meat – they wanted to cultivate wheat and experimented with tobacco. The planters forced the Irish to live a settled life, to sow wheat and to convert to Protestantism; they also financed a mass resettlement of Scots and English to Ireland. These plans of commodification would have been successful had they not been sabotaged by the humble potato. Having no trade value of its own, the potato supported the growth of the local population. Escaping the mercantile pump, the Irish peasants appeared lazy and indolent; but they were fruitful and multiplied. The wet, perishable potato helped them to avoid dry, tradable wheat.

Still, Richard Boyle made his fortune by leasing out his land to the newly arrived settlers. He lost everything during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, but his sons recuperated the plantations. Robert Boyle invested his funds – the converted labour of Irish peasants – in the Royal Society and in his own inventions. 20 Later, Thomas Newcomen built on Boyle’s experiment to create his steam machine. The encounter between the air pump and the mercantile pump engendered the Industrial Revolution. But the great question of labour’s relation to nature remained unresolved.

Having lost the war in America, the British Empire kept the jewels in its crown – the sugar islands in the Atlantic. The radicals were horrified by the military defeat and disappointed in the commercial profits from the colonies. 21 Free trade would allow England to receive the same raw materials without having to pay for an army and a navy. But ‘the new colonial system’ hardly differed from the mercantilist tradition. After the Treaty of Paris (1783), imperial interests transferred to India and Canada, although this didn’t prevent the empire acquiring new colonies in Australia and Africa. Then the bad news came: the sovereign states of America purchased Louisiana from France in 1801, allowing Napoleon to finance his preparations for war. The consequences of this development cost the mother country more dearly than all her colonies put together.

Notes

Notes

1 Knorr, British Colonial Theories , pp. 26–59; see also Wakefield, England and America , pp. 244–65; Glamann, Dutch–Asiatic Trade ; Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire . 2 Quoted from Knorr, British Colonial Theories , p. 84. 3 Quoted ibid., p. 106. 4 Ibid., p. 103. 5 Ross, The Life of Adam Smith . 6 Pushkin, Eugene Onegin , stanzas 23–4 (chap. 1); Smith is mentioned in stanza 7. 7 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , pp. 182, 192. 8 Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism , pp. 5–6. 9 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 22. 10 Ibid., p. 19. 11 Tocqueville, Democracy in America , p. 530. 12 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , p. xxiv. 13 Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce , pp. 248–9, 254–6, 379. 14 Kulisher, Istoriya russkoy torgovli , p. 161. 15 Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation , p. 61. 16 Prinz, ‘New perspectives on Marx as a Jew’. 17 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 31, 130, 52. 18 McNally, Monsters of the Market , pp. 113–47; Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism , pp. 99–140. 19 De Vries, The Industrious Revolution ; Ogilvie and Cerman, European Proto-Industrialization . 20 Canny, The Upstart Earl ; Shapin and Shaffir, Leviathan and the Air-Pump ; Principe, The Aspiring Adept . 21 Knorr, British Colonial Theories , p. 210.