In his 1983 book Endangered Lives, Anthony Wohl describes what Simon and his medical teams discovered about the working-class diet from these studies:Īs in the country, so in the town, the staples were bread, potatoes, and tea…. Simon, whom Marx much admired, organized the first major investigations into British public health, and this research was the main source for Marx’s epidemiological knowledge of the English working class in the 1860s. Now, as in Marx’s day, our knowledge of the diet of the Victorian working class relies primarily on official studies commissioned by John Simon, the Chief Medical Health Officer of the Privy Council, and the leading medical authority in England. In his discussions of food consumption under capitalism, Marx is directly concerned less with consumption by the upper classes than with the nutritional intake of the great majority of the population, namely the working class, both urban and rural. The object here is to overturn the prevailing view, which focuses simply on questions of the cheapness of food and the irrational forms of food consumption prevalent in contemporary society, and to replace this with a deeper perspective that locates the contemporary food regime in the underlying material conditions of capitalist production, understood as an alientated metabolism of nature and society. In outlining Marx’s analysis of the commodification of food in capitalist society, I will proceed from food consumption to food production and food regimes, and finally to fundamental problems of the soil and the social metabolism of human beings and nature. 5 “All labor,” he wrote in Capital, “is originally first directed towards the appropriation and production of food.” 6 Yet these issues were far from marginal to Marx, as he based his materialist conception of history on the notion of humans as corporeal beings, who needed, as “the first premise of human existence,” to produce their means of subsistence, beginning with food, water, shelter, clothing, and extending to all of the other means of life. Since Marx’s analysis of food production and food regimes was not developed in a single text but integrated into this larger critique, which remained unfinished, and in some cases unpublished, it is understandable that many commentators have missed this aspect of his work altogether. Moreover, these issues are not peripheral, but organically connected to Marx’s larger critique of capitalism. I will show that Marx in fact developed a detailed and sophisticated critique of the industrial food system in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, in the period that historians have called “the Second Agricultural Revolution.” 4 Not only did he study the production, distribution, and consumption of food he was the first to conceive of these as constituting a problem of changing food “regimes”-an idea that has since become central to discussions of the capitalist food system.Īs will become clear, food for Marx was far more than a “passing interest”: in his work one finds analyses of the development of agriculture in different modes of production climate and food cultivation the chemistry of the soil industrial agriculture livestock conditions new technologies in food production and preparation toxic additives in food products food security and much more. Nevertheless, Marx was such a keen observer of the political economy of capitalism and the metabolism of nature and society that lack of an analysis of food would represent a surprising and significant gap in his work. To be sure, the capitalist food regime at the time of the Industrial Revolution was far less developed than our own, and hence had only just begun to be theorized, by Marx or others. van Otterloo declared that “food as such is only of passing interest to Marx,” quipping that the only mention of “‘Diet’ in an index of Marx’s writings” referred “to a political assembly.” 3 In their 1992 introduction to The Sociology of Food, Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. Yet despite the severity of these problems and their integral relation to the capitalist commodity system, it is generally believed that Karl Marx himself contributed little to our understanding of food, beyond a few general comments on subsistence and hunger. 2 Amid plentiful food production, hunger remains a chronic problem, and food security is now a pressing concern for many of the world’s people. Discussions of the economics and sociology of food and food regimes seem to be everywhere today, with some of the most important contributions made by Marxian theorists. Hunger is hunger but the hunger that is satisfied by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork differs from hunger that devours raw meat with the help of hands, nails and teeth.įood has become a core contradiction of contemporary capitalism.
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