Book review: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
A History of the World in Seven Cheap
Things, By Raj Patel and Jason W Moore
Reviewed by Mark O'Connell
Writing a history of work without care-work would be like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning
the water.
Consider the McNugget.
Consider not merely its proprietary combination of succulence and crispness and
flavour, but also its usefulness as a symbol of the time in which we find
ourselves. Consider its substance, derived from the world’s most common bird,
bred to reach maturity within weeks, and with a breast so large it can barely
walk. Consider
that 60 billion of these birds are slaughtered every year, resulting in an
abundant source of cheap food, and that this work necessitates a vast pool of
cheap human labour. And consider that, long after humans have disappeared from
the Earth, what will remain of us, along with the immortal residue of nuclear
waste, is a fossil record that will register the truly insane volume of chicken
carcasses we left behind.
In the early pages of
their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel
and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the
modern era. One of their central contentions is that we are no longer living in
the Holocene, but in a new geological era they refer to as the Capitalocene –
the currently fashionable
term “Anthropocene”, they argue, suggests that our current state of
ecological emergency is merely the result of humans doing what humans do,
whereas the reality is that it flows out of the specific historical phenomenon
of capitalism. As a term, then, Capitalocene is designed to nudge us away from
evolutionary determinism, and from a sense of collective culpability for
climate change, towards an understanding of the way in which the destruction of
nature has largely been the result of an economic system organised around a
minority class and its pursuit of profit. “We may all be in the same boat when
it comes to climate change,” as they put it, “but most of us are in steerage.”
Patel and Moore’s
essential argument is that the history of capitalism, and therefore of our
current mess, can be usefully viewed through the lens of cheapness. (An
earlier, more knottily theoretical work of eco-Marxism by Moore, Capitalism
in the Web of Life, argues that “cheap nature” is as central an imperative
of capitalism as cheap labour.) The seven “things” of their misleadingly
clickbaity title are not objects or consumer products, so much as conceptual
categories: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They present
these categories as reliant on each other for their cheapness, as enmeshed in a
kind of ecosystem. In the chapter on cheap money, they demonstrate the process
of cheapening through the barbaric silver
mining practices of 16th-century Spanish colonialists in Peru. “Cheap
lives turned into cheap workers dependent on cheap care and cheap food in home
communities, requiring cheap fuel to collect and process cheap nature to
produce cheap money.”.. read more:
