In May of 2020, workers aboard Royal Caribbean’s Majesty of the Seas ship hoisted a banner atop a pool and playground area on the ship’s deck, reading “How Many More Suicides Do You Need?”1 Following months of failed efforts to repatriate employees on sea-stranded cruise ships, waylaid and deserted of consumer activity by the global efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, the luxury cruise industry resigned its ships to an indefinite voyage at sea. In March and April of that year, crews that were trapped aboard had to themselves undergo company-mandated lockdown regimens, in order to contain any spread of the virus as best they could. Workers aboard these liners were confined to their cabins, many windowless, and allowed out for supplies and other “necessary activities” merely once or twice a day. Certainly, a degree of the initial compliance must have been tied to the hopes that such would accelerate repatriation and a return to some less-restrictive form of life back on land. Despite promises by their employers that all was being done to accommodate governments’ lockdowns of ports of entry and restrictions on travel, even to the extent of coordinating private and commercial transportation of crew members off-ship, the majority of these crews languished in their ship-bound cells for months, with no conceivable end in sight.
By May the reports of workers’ suicides emerged from several ships and became generally known amongst laborers throughout the industry. Due to the restrictions on movement and contact in the vessels themselves, some were not known for days following their deaths. The media coverage of these events is somewhat sparse, the impenetrability of the ocean’s vastness almost its own buffer to immediacy. At one point, 4 workers had died in 10 days, many classified as either suicide or “unclear circumstances.”2 That same month, workers aboard the Royal Caribbean ship Navigator of the Seas launched a hunger strike,3 seeking to break this barrier of the aqueous and terrestrial in order to force from their employers, now more aptly functioning as de facto jailers, guarantees and proof of their efforts undertaken to repatriate the crew. Jonathan Fishman, a spokesman for Royal Caribbean, released a statement the day the story broke to the media: “The situation was resolved this morning after an amicable discussion between our captain and our crew members.” However, this was contrary to the crew’s plans to continue the action.
Perhaps the leaders of this industry had abandoned the complicated and costly efforts of navigating the repatriation of staff through labyrinthine complexes of government travel and border restrictions for the navigation of their internal crises of capital preservation. As the 338 ships comprising the cruise industry docked by June 2020, the arrested movement and collapse of tourism exacted a toll of $1 billion of fleet maintenance from Carnival alone.4 Reducing overhead has since meant getting rid of ships, and mitigating the drain on capital holdings that meeting a fallow luxury liner’s ongoing maintenance requirements entails.
Large cruise ships, some upwards of 200,000 tonnes, were then sold en masse to shipbreaking scrap yards, where they would each be disassembled by dozens of workers over months. By November of 2020, this constituted a boom for the shipbreaking industry.5 In shipyards such as Aliaga in Turkey, Alang in India, Gadani in Pakistan, or Chattogram in Bangladesh, massive luxury liners filled the ports, awaiting disassembly and the organization of their disaggregated contents into scrap. This industry itself draws international scrutiny, as the uneven geography of industrial standards places these concentrated centers of activity on the South Asian coastlines, and the peripheral edges of the European Union’s boundaries in the Mediterranean. Highly exploitable labor reigns supreme as the choice executor of this dangerous task. The processing of waste is consigned to the rearguards of the global economy. Often these processes are undertaken on the beach itself, and the sea becomes yet again a receptacle for waste that cannot once more find a place in the global movement and self-expansion of value. According to the NGO Shipbreaking Platform’s 2018-19 Impact Report: “Millions of tons of hazardous wastes are exported to South Asia in the form of end-of-life ships each year. Ships contain numerous toxic materials such as asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs), oil residues and heavy metals. Unless these materials are properly managed, there is a risk of exposure that can harm both workers and the environment. When ships are grounded, pulled and broken apart on intertidal mudflats, there are no means to contain or remediate pollution. Instead, the tide washes away debris, paint chips and oil spillages.”6
Uniting these apparently disparate industries are the entangled worlds of extreme wealth and impoverishment, internally mediated through the intensive exploitation of migrant labor. Aboard the cruise liners are workers from all over the world, laboring over the decadently tailored experiences of the work-weary petit bourgeois consumer for wages ranging from $650-$2000 a month, certainly carrying a pronounced purchasing power upon their returns to home in places such as Ukraine or the Philippines. In the shipbreaking yards, workers old and young in Bangladesh, often 25% under the age of 18, journey from the rural countrysides to the coastal beaches to deconstruct these massive towers of luxurious consumption for wages of $3.00 a day, pressed between the eventual decisions to either send money back home, pay rent, or try to save what they can.7 The toil underlying such rich, fanciful environments of play and the fabric of capitalist exploitation upon which its possibility and realization is conditioned and articulated is most directly understood by way of the ruined bodies and accelerated environmental degradation it produces. The brows continue to sweat, the heat rises, and the sea, silent and absorbing our gaze into its void horizon, ominously rises in turn, advancing further into the muted consciousness of lives bound to a meager survival.
Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás’ new book Capitalism and the Sea seeks to present to us a compact and contextualized history of capitalism’s maritime origins, and the means by which the ocean remains an incredibly crucial space in the reproduction and transformations of capitalism historically and today. The vastness of this subject appears to present little obstacle to the work, its intervention a means of drawing out the more complex spatial and temporal determinations in the organization of social life as capitalist social relations, declaring from the outset that “global capitalism is a seaborne phenomenon.”8 The chapters sketch out the arc of their argument by way of identifying distinct regimes of operation within which the formation and reproduction of capitalism at sea are explored. The dynamic formal metamorphoses of capital in circulation begin the investigation, followed by the ever-shifting problematic of sovereignty aboard the atomized unit of the ship that comprises the order of human ventures on the sea, “historicizing the dynamic connections between maritime flows and terrestrial authority.”9 This order is placed in connection to its telos through the dynamic exploitation to which capitalist social relations configure their particular social metabolism, the labor regimes of several centuries presented in their dialectical relation to the distinct natural contours of the sea as biophysical-ecological space and socially constituted sphere of practical engagement.
The focus on nature and its definite limits, their eventual distortions and overcomings instantiated and made necessary by the dictums of capital accumulation, become the means by which a vast sphere of appropriation is illuminated, from the global fishing industries to their geopolitical mechanisms of struggle over claims to the ocean’s surface, and the uneven exploitation and distribution of what lies beneath. From there we approach a contemporary subject of much import and analysis, the global logistics industries that now exist as the nearly invisible yet utterly essential integuments of global production and trade, surveying some of the distinct revolutions in industrial technique and statecraft that allow for a stable functioning of an utterly malleable and constantly reconstituted global capitalist process. Our journey ends with a new hidden abode in the offshore world of “maritime utopias and insular infernos”,10 where the nearly impenetrable horizons of the oceanic world are presented to the reader as an imaginary separation of the species from its social world in the Thiel-esque fantasies of sovereign islands, made more concretely realistic in the safe distance of offshore tax havens and the relatively unseen drilling of the ocean floor for fossil fuels, the accelerated intensity of climate change in the 21st century creating an artificial ecology where new islands of steel, concrete, and interminable amounts of plastic rise up over the ocean’s surface, and from there transform geological and climatic patterns beyond expectation or experience.
The social-geological synthesis which informs the interdependency of land and sea for Campling and Colás arrives to us in the introduction through the curious word “terraqueous”, meaning that “consisting of land and water”, as a means of articulating a specific predicament that has “forced different land-based societies to reckon with the bountiful but potentially ferocious energy of the liquid vastness that covers seven-tenths of the planet -- adapting, creating and transforming diverse coastal and marine spaces, institutions and cosmologies to human habitation and social reproduction.”11 This synthetic word is borrowed from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a work which similarly depicts, as an aspect of the its own immense internal totality, a problematic of the illusory autonomy of those at sea from the necessities of the social relations that direct their functions in the relief of the landed world. The passage from Chapter 14 from which this word is lifted demonstrates the way in which the historical, geopolitical and socioeconomic machinations of man’s terrestrial world dominate the blank canvas of the sea:
“And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”12
The sea cannot be a pure other to the social world through which it is made intelligible. The Nantucketer here is but a stand-in, a current occupier of the mantle of conquest through which the sea, the mastery of its passage, is made known to us. Empire and exploitation are as alive abroad as they are on the terrain from which they are presumed to originate. The ocean and the ships that traverse it are, as Melville presents it here and throughout Moby Dick, adopted in a comparable manner by Campling and Colás, where “the ocean is not merely a barrier to circulation but a place, and the ship a site of social disciplining.”13 To embark from the shore is not to depart from the social relations which animate the ship’s movement. Those enlisted into the crew, the compulsions which bring them aboard and compel them to submit to the sovereignty of the captain are not the whims of mere individual agents, but a moment in the reproduction of the dynamics which have made their arrival necessary, though its character and industry may be arbitrary. Territorial sovereignty does not reside in the state as a concrete attachment to one land, but is encompassed by the real indeterminacies of the struggles to assert and maintain this control over the sea, and most importantly over the bearers of the labor-power which is consumed in the course of developing the wealth of nations.
Campling and Colás chart out for us a complex interpenetrating tripartite schema, where the interlocking mediations of labor, capital, and state are historically and spatially situated in a periodization of capitalist practice. Adopting Jairus Banaji’s call for an analysis of distinct forms of capitalism,14 three “qualitatively different” eras characterize an arc of each chapter, those of commercial capitalism (1651-1849), industrial capitalism (1850-1973), and neoliberal capitalism (1974-present).15 In their own presentation, however, historical demarcations are never made too blandly, deployed instead as a means of establishing these distinctions that allows for a specificity in approach, an adoption of the type of grandiloquent arc one may find in Arrighi’s mechanistic abstractions, but never to deprive their history of any life. The evolutions in practice and the contours of transformation are covered over centuries in each chapter, approached as a different aspect of these dynamics each time, always arriving to the same present. For Campling and Colás, the objective is “to steer between the Charybdis of ahistorical formalisms that define capitalism merely on the basis of economic exploitation through free wage labour, and the Scylla of infinite regression whereby any and every historical instance of commodity exchange is classified as being capitalist.”16 What is more precise about this approach is the attendant caution with which they approach these long-standing historiographic debates on capitalism’s origins, and allows them to adopt that which is necessary to address their primary concern:
“Our position can be summarised as follows: sometime in the course of the ‘long’ sixteenth century (1450-1650) a historically particular way of ‘committing social labour to the transformation of nature’ emerged, first in the English countryside, and then gradually and unevenly extended overseas by latching on to pre-existing circuits of long distance trade. This peculiar mode of production was grafted onto all sorts of labour regimes, forms of political rule and sociocultural institutions, but without ever forsaking its indispensable quality: the competitive accumulation of surplus value for the purpose of ceaselessly generating further value. It is this logic, we argue in the rest of the book, that gives shape to capitalist modernity as a historical epoch and condition. It is the imperative of value creation that produces the sea as a particular space of exploitation, appropriation, and world ordering during the modern period.”17
In this book, it is stated continually that capitalism is conceived “as a set of historically specific social relations” and that this perspective allows for an account of “the interplay between capitalism and the sea -- between society and nature” that “underlines the mutually constituted, yet constantly changing and causally uneven, interaction between land and sea in the reproduction of both capitalism and the oceans.”18 This social-ecological metabolism, in which the authors’ primary emphasis lies in the specific manner in which social labor is committed to the transformation of nature, finds its first critical exegetical synthesis in an introductory foray into the so-called transition debates, specifically on the question of the “commercialisation model.” Europe’s predominance in the history of capitalist development is attended to as “a foundational moment of primitive accumulation where capitalist social relations first become discernible, and a subsequent, more expansive process where capitalist reproduction becomes generalized, both geographically and socially.”19 Campling and Colás survey the historiographic terrain from Braudel to Arrighi and Wallerstein, all the way to Brenner and Wood and Banaji, grounding their own framework with this “analytical juncture where two contrasting conceptions of capitalism are on offer: one that underlines the distinctive combination of overseas trade and war in the birth and expansion of a Europe-centered capitalist world economy, the other which emphasises the commodification of social relations in the English countryside as the key to the emergence of a uniquely capitalist market in one country.”20 What is asked in relation to these debates is a question seldom seen in their engagement, that of “is it possible for both approaches to be right, at least in part?”21
In considering the “interconnections between circulation and production in capitalist development,” Campling and Colás already position their own investigation in a higher register of practical historiographic synthesis than is often attended to in these debates. Marx’s self-positing presuppositions laid out in the interpenetrating threefold circuits of commodity, money, and productive forms of capital foster a “history of commercial capitalism [that] saw the reconfiguration of relations of production in a diversity of places”.22 It is their contention that “these abstract categories and their correspondingly challenging periodisation can be thought through in relation to concrete historical experiences” such that an understanding of capitalism’s origins necessarily takes seriously and incorporates how “state-sponsored violence, monopoly trade, colonial conquest, maritime predation and resource plunder all played a key role in facilitating this mediation between various spheres of production, in effect creating new markets for capitalist reproduction.”23 The strength of Capitalism and the Sea is not that these questions have never been asked, but that the analysis of the abstract, structural imperatives of value relations as conceived by Marx are not frequently enough brought to bear on the concrete, historical aspects of their formal determination.
This attempted synthesis then takes us into an immersive analysis of capitalist development at sea, not as a subordinate plane to the demands of terrestrial activity, but in which the practice of capitalist exploitation at sea is a vital incubator of the social relations themselves. The “combination of territorial sovereignty with freedom of trade and navigation” is an integral dynamic of the combinatory process of capitalist economic development, the production and accumulation of surplus value, and the political consolidation of capitalist power in the formation of the modern state, where the manifests of ships and their conduct in world trade have “from their inception been buttressed by the military-juridical authority of states and their diplomatic interaction.”24 This inter-state relation of conflicting military authorities as an expression of competition, a metabolic motive force of capitalist reproduction, is one level of engagement within which an entire complex of uneven and differentially-hierarchical structures of relations of exploitation prevail on any one ship. The “vicious coexistence on eighteenth-century ships of chattel slavery and free waged labour” poses a challenge to the fanciful notion of the relative “freedom of the seas”, in which the freedom from landed life is nothing but a subjection to “distinctive uses of force, violence and domination, which has given exploitation in merchant fleets a markedly militarised character.”25 Where “the modern ship has been a worksite characterised by the exception”, in which “the captain’s absolute authority”26 reigns supreme as a personification of state power, as can be attested by the discussion on articles of mutiny and their juridical enforcement, the imperialist positions of hegemonic states is reproduced in the establishment of “a racist hierarchy in the maritime labour market”, through which a “heightened rate of exploitation with its cost-cutting pay and detrimental terms and conditions” emerged as an intermediary mechanism by which the “constant supply of sailors at sea” was guaranteed.27
Yet it is also the case that workers in maritime industries, especially dockers and stevedores, possess an immense structural power due to the volume of commodities circulating through globally-integrated ports. Campling and Colás track the earliest emergence of maritime trade unions in Britain in 1825, but also through their origins in the class struggles against the forced impressment of labor directed by press gangs, organized groups which would round up men off streets for forced labor at sea, as well as working the African coast for slaver vessels.28 The Gordon Riots of June 1780, in which “over twenty crimping houses were targeted, alongside prisons and debtors’ houses” and “impressed sailors, debtors and petty criminals were freed” forced an eventual parliamentary inquiry into the practice of impressment, and carried through into labor struggles against the practice into the first decades of the nineteenth century.29 The incitement to which struggle matches itself is the antagonism which fosters the very means by which labor organizes itself, a moment in which a class interest becomes articulated through not solely the mass exploitation of a class, but its collective action for-itself against that subjugation. In turn, this prompts the associated organization of capitalists, the fragmentation of a laboring class’ self-composition as a defense of its interests. It is through this practical dialectic of class struggles that Campling and Colás are able to so deftly demonstrate the continuity in capitalist development to the type of seafaring industry characteristic of the world now, in which transnational capital interacts with a stratified and differentially exploited arbitrage of multinational labor.
The development of shipping capital in and through this practical dialectic leads us to illuminate the contemporary strategies of capital in the contemporary era, one in which the global integration and international coordination between states is no less fraught with competition, yet also, despite the decomposition of an organized working class movement, still involves a structural dynamic of reproduced decomposition in the actual process of capital accumulation. The strategies of “investment in ever-larger vessels that need fewer crew per tonne of cargo, state subsidies, corporate concentration and centralisation, buying flags of convenience to increase post-tax profits and reduce the costs of compliance with labor and other laws, and precariously employing seafarers from low-income (‘labour supply’) countries” have constructed a seafaring terrain where no human may enter but that which serves capital, and which has fragmented and diminished specific threats to the consolidated expression of an organized labor force in a significant way.30 The multinationality of many crews, the precarity of their employment, the “open registries or flags of convenience” that “use state sovereignty to create new spaces of accumulation that cut costs and bypass the legal resources available to organised labour” all act in order to “bypass or undermine previous political victories by organised labour as enshrined in national legislation.”31 The imperatives of growth given by the accumulation of value as abstract social wealth are such that labor productivity is a constantly enforced self-negation of the laborer, the setting in motion of ever larger productive forces which dwarf ever shrinking crews, a top-heavy metabolic rift which manifests not only in the diminishing guarantees of the wage relation, but in the ecological devastation which is thrust upon the world as unevenly as the regime of abstract labor which induces it.
This social-ecological critique of the capitalist social metabolic order of reproduction is linked many times in this book to a compelling examination of mutually destructive antagonism between our current society and the type of nature it fosters and reproduces. In the chapter on “Appropriation”, fishing industries and inter-state competition over prime fishing waters are guided by intensive extractive practices. In the practice of massive purse-seining of tuna, in which large nets are dispensed underneath a fishing vessel, encircling schools of tuna and from which they are subsequently pumped aboard using seawater, the “negative effects on fish quality” emerge from the means by which such activity causes “severe distress and/or death by suffocation for a large proportion of the fish.”32 This efficiently yet haphazardly slaughtered flesh “under stress undergoes chemical change - known as ‘burning’ - degrading the quality of the meat.”33 Furthermore, the “storage in brine at sea for months on end results in salt seeping into the flesh of the tuna, further diminishing its quality and raising the sodium content of the final canned meat,” producing not only one aspect of our dietary impediments which reproduce health failings and overburden financialized and gutted health infrastructures the world over, but also a curious look into the intractability of such a totalizing network of an antagonistic metabolism, of which the technological determinants themselves are such embodiments of the social relations and labor processes they have automated and maximalized that their functions remain locked in service to the global commodity chains for which they are necessary.34
Yet this aspect of an integrated social-ecological metabolic order is often held as separate spheres, our growing consciousness of ecological transformations and their potentially devastating effects come through most popularly in the rising temperatures and sea levels that characterize many mainstream discourses on climate change. It is all too often the case that this only becomes apparent in flashes, tragically after a cataclysmic weather event, whether hurricane, wildfire, or cold wave, has already devastated entire regions or communities, in turn, in some cases, intensifying migratory patterns of labor which intensify the policing of border regimes in order to manage the stability of global labor arbitrage and differential rates of exploitation. The steadfast commitments of fossil fuel industries to ocean extraction evade direct antagonism with their opponents on land, their dual productions of oil and plastics acting to construct climatic “positive feedback loops involved in making the sea a dump site for onshore waste.” The alarming toxicity of petroleum pollution is most evident in the direct effect of its being unleashed in the sea itself, where it “flows to sea principally as river run-off, from tankers and refineries, and only in smaller measure as a result of accidental spills or offshore oil production. It combines with other contaminants (chemicals, sewage, metals) dredged, discharged or extracted from coastal areas and beyond to produce a poisonous cocktail of societal waste that has entered the marine food chain and contributes to various visible and invisible forms of pollution, ranging from eutrophication to microplastics in fish.” Referring to Andreas Malm’s research in Fossil Capital (2016), wherein it is demonstrated that the internal class struggle of capital’s command over and exploitation of surplus labor and its transformation into the production of surplus value is at root in the adoption of fossil fuels and their predominance, as a means of controlling a mobile energy resource resistant to common appropriation, Campling and Colás tell us that “the underlying social relations producing 1,500 billion tons of carbon by the twenty-first century from the burning of fossil fuel were always socially and spatially unequal, as will be the consequences.”35 This is indeed a crisis made by people, but it is not a crisis of a uniform humanity standing in abstract opposition to nature, for it is a distinct social metabolic order, in which this accelerating intensification of climate patterns is the “product of political strategies aimed at variously upholding or reinforcing the dominant social order, be it to facilitate financial flows, pacify unruly populations or test nuclear weapons that will secure such order.”36
The sea and the terraqueous world is not an order of nature apart from the structural mediations which condition and articulate the social world of the human species, as much as our present social metabolic order with nature as objective conditions of our existence, and thus necessarily appropriated by us for our subsistence, has reduced our thoughts of mastery over nature to an inversion in which we are subordinated and vulnerable to its apocalyptic distortions. This points us towards the same problematic of society contra nature which Campling and Colás articulate throughout their text, as it is not that we have not solely made a society made against nature, but we have created a metabolism where nature’s external otherness is a precondition of our appropriation of it. The undoing of nature from the very means by which it is made intelligible to us, through our social labor’s commitment to its appropriation, and the objectification of labor’s collective self-activity in the course of this metabolism, is a nature that cannot exist but as a fetish. In his critique of Feuerbach’s contemplative, romantic materialism, Marx demonstrates the folly of such notions of “restoring a unity” between man and nature, for
“[...] when we conceive things thus, as they really are and happened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as will be seen even more clearly later, quite simply into an empirical fact. For instance, the important question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno [Bauer] goes so far as to speak of “the antitheses in nature and history”, as though these were two separate “things” and man did not always have before him an historical nature and a natural history) out of which all the “unfathomably lofty works” on “substance” and “self-consciousness” were born, crumbles of itself when we understand that the celebrated “unity of man with nature” has always existed in industry and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development of industry, just like the “struggle” of man with nature, right up to the development of his productive powers on a corresponding basis.”37
In this epoch of social labor and interdependency, it is clear for Marx that “the nature that preceded human history [...] is nature which today no longer exists anywhere.”38 There is no nature for human social life beyond those means by which we engage with these objective conditions, and by which they in turn reciprocally determine a metabolic interaction with the means by which we appropriate them. An indelible image of the internal and determinate contradictions of capitalist society and its social metabolic order has been produced recently in the underwater explosion of a gas leak from an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Circulating online is an accident surely more common than we are able to see from land, but the image of an oceanic inferno presents us with an elemental contradiction of almost primal significance, a sign of a world we have completely transformed as much as ourselves, yet the history of which is quite concrete and capable of being apprehended. It is not an inherent relationship of society and nature which produces these crises and draws forth such visions of ecological annihilation, but a mode of production and its consequently necessary modes of natural appropriation and dynamics of accumulation that distort the material mediations of the species to its conditions of life to such a degree that a metabolic rift may be spoken of. The sea is not a neutral terrain from which we are free from the systems and relations of power on land, but another domain of “the great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.”39
Campling and Colás (2021) p. 1
Ibid, p. 27
Ibid, p. 270
Ibid, p. 3
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or the Whale (1851), Chapter 14: Nantucket.
Campling and Colás (2021) p. 8
Jairus Banaji, Theory As History (2010) pp. 359-60. “To construe the ways labour is exploited and controlled as distinct relations (and therefore modes) of production is to end with a model that sees the capitalist world-economy as structured by an articulation of different modes of production (usually ‘feudalism’). But, historical materialism needs to move beyond this motionless paradigm to a construction of the more complex ways capitalism works. In fact, the huge commercial expansion of the nineteenth century very largely involved an integration of peasant agriculture into industrial capitalism, which, in turn, spurred the expansion of more local systems of commercial capitalism and a widespread dispossession of the peasantry. Thus what the world-economy of the nineteenth century threw up was an articulation of forms of capitalism more than a combination of modes of production, in other words, economic changes driven by the gigantic expansion of industry and the rapid growth in demand for cotton, tobacco, silk, indigo and so on. The gravitational pull of European and American industry wrought changes in the distant countrysides they drew on through local trajectories of accumulation and dispossession. The prehistories of a more fully developed capitalism and the struggles bound up with primitive accumulation were only ways in which ‘capitalist world trade’, in Marx’s expression, ‘destroyed and dissolved all earlier forms of production’, ‘revolutionizing the entire economic structure of society’ the world over.”
Campling and Colás (2021) p. 11
Ibid, p. 10
Ibid, p. 10
Ibid, p. 54
Ibid, p. 55
Ibid, p. 59
Ibid, p. 59
Ibid, p. 61
Ibid, p. 61
Ibid, p. 74
Ibid, p. 130
Ibid, p. 130
Ibid, pp. 125-6
Ibid, pp. 136-7
Ibid, p. 137
Ibid, p. 147
Ibid, p. 147
Ibid, p. 174
Ibid, p. 174
Ibid, p. 174
Ibid, p. 297
Ibid, p. 308
Marx, The German Ideology (1845) Part I. Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook. B. The Illusion of the Epoch 2) Feuerbach’s contemplative and inconsistent materialism.
Ibid
Lord Bacon’s Version of the Psalms, taken from Herman Melville’s opening extracts to Moby Dick.