The Real Subsumption and Liberation of Food or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Genetic Modification

The Real Subsumption and Liberation of Food or:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Genetic Modification

My final paper for a graduate special topics course on the Frankfurt School taught by Dr. Andrew Feenberg

at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.Submitted December 2014.

Introduction

Though food is now merely one commodity among others,

just another use-value through which capital circulates, it

remains essential to the reproduction of capitalist social

relations and must be a primary consideration for all forms

of resistance. This has also been argued by the anarcho-

communist Peter Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread (2007) and

Silvia Frederici, who in Revolution at Point Zero (2012) says that

the reproduction of everyday life is where resistance must

be located; food production and preparation is one such site

of resistance. Though rarely speaking directly about food,

Herbert Marcuse’s voice can be added to these others. In

One-Dimensional Man (1964) he argues that in order to create a

liberatory society, the technical basis of that society must

be reorganized to address both out vital and creative needs.

Food is undoubtedly a vital need, and its irrational

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organization via capital has increased significantly under

the auspices of technological rationality. Indeed, according

to Marx, the subsumption of the agricultural labour process

under capital can only lend itself to irrationality. “The

moral of history, also to be deduced from other observations

concerning agriculture, is that the capitalist system works

against a rational agriculture, or that a rational

agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system”

(Marx 2010:np). As can be said of so many of Marx’s

writings, this passage from Capital, Vol. III rings truer now than

ever before; capitalist food production is fraught with

risks to human and animal health and is complicit in the

devastation of countless ecosystems through deforestation,

pollution, and over-farming.

Where capital moves as a force contradictory to life, an

inhuman power as Marx says (1964:125), the contradiction

between the abstract and concrete character of commodities

registers most profoundly in the food commodity. Capital

itself is reproduced in the individual reproduction of

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labour power through food.1 The capitalist imperatives of

production and profit, however, have driven nutrients out of

the soil, and encouraged processing techniques that preserve

use-values as the bearers of exchange value but degrade the

nutritional substance of food. Capital has also changed the

very nature of nature, for example, through genetic

modification. This paper will explore these characteristics

of capitalist food production using Marx’s theory of the

subsumption of labour under capital, arguing that it can be

applied to edible matter, as can be shown with the examples

of animal protein and genetically modified (GM) seeds. By

1 In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx says that “[t]he individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labour process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital” (1976:717-8; emphasis mine). Food is a necessary element of capital’s own reproduction both as the worker’s means of subsistence anda medium for capital’s constant valorization. Admittedly, Marx uses the concept of the means of subsistence to describe the bundle of commodities the worker requires to reproduce herself which—besides food—includes clothing, shelter, and certain moral considerations, for instance, the provision of holidays for religious observance. In this paper, I bracket food as the most constitutive element of the worker’s reproduction to capital because it arguably also represents one of, if not the first site of capitalist accumulation. The enclosure of common land and subsequent commodification of agricultural produce are, according to Marx (1976) and Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002), fundamental preconditions of the capitalist mode of production. Without the commodification of food, there would be no wage labour or basis for exploitation.

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subjecting the matter we eat and the soil we use to grow it

to the same logics of acceleration, productivity, and

obsolescence applied to the labour process, capital

continually undermines the ground of its own reproduction,

in disastrous accord with its contradictory nature. To

articulate my argument, I will join Marcuse’s writings on

technological rationality to those of his theoretical

predecessor, Georg Lukács, and his fellows of the Frankfurt

School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Their collective

theories on dialectics, rationality, and abstraction will

provide a critical dimension to my analysis of capitalist

food production. My research on the subject has also turned

up certain themes that will be touched on through out,

namely, domination, durability, and distance, in particular

referring to the work of Harriet Friedmann on food regime

theory and Guido Ruivenkamp on biotechnology.

Marx’s Theory of Subsumption

In order to discuss real subsumption, I must first

begin with Marx’s definition of the formal subsumption of

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labour. Formal subsumption occurs when capitalists take

command of labor processes that originate prior to the

capital relation through the imposition of the wage, but do

not change the content of the labor process, i.e. how the

labor is performed. In real subsumption the labor process is

internally reorganized to meet the demands of capital

accumulation (Marx 1976:645). For example, craft labour,

like shoe cobbling, is really subsumed once the work of one

cobbler is divided among many workers in a factory setting

and moreover, when social labour is objectified in machines,

which then organize the conditions of shoe production anew.

As Marx writes in Grundrisse (1973), machinery as fixed

capital is the form most suited to capital’s accumulation

because it circumvents the limits of the working day and

regulates the worker, circumventing the perceived limits of

the spontaneous, irrational body.2 The real subsumption of

labour gives way to reification and rationalization, which

2 “The worker’s activity…is determined and regulated on all sides by themovement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power of the machine itself” (Marx 1973:693).

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Marcuse sees equally as forces subjecting the human and

matter to instruments of control. “Scientific enterprise,

rationality assumes the form of methodical construction;

organization and handling of matter as the mere stuff of

control” (Marcuse 1964:115). The real subsumption of labour

and matter can be observed in the example of the

slaughterhouse worker and the object of her work in meat

processing plants.

Marcuse discusses how values are embedded in the

technical basis of society, and under capitalism, those

values take the form of control, acceleration, and

productivity. The demand for efficient mass production has

put slaughterhouse workers under unbelievable mental and

bodily stress with the acceleration of production lines.

Their working life is passed in repetitive, acute motions

that leave them prone to injury and even death (working with

sharp blades,3 fast moving equipment, and toxic substances)

3 “[T]he rate of these cumulative trauma injuries in the meatpacking industry is far higher that the rate in any other American industry. It is roughly thirty-three times higher than the national average…Many slaughterhouse workers make a knife cut every two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts in an eight-hour shift” (Schlosser 2005:173).

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(see Schlosser 2005). In the case of poultry production, for

example, “[l]ine speeds have increased dramatically from

[processing] 143 birds a minute a decade ago to 190 today”

(Hauter 2012:204). An XL Foods factory in Brooks, Alberta

slaughters 4,000 cows a day, producing two million pounds of

beef or “the equivalent of 3,000 steaks a minute” (Wingrove

2012). Lukács puts into context the position of the human

worker with respect to these highly rationalized

environments, showing that she is merely one more element of

abstraction within the calculated whole.

In consequence, man’s activity does not go beyond the correct calculation of the possible outcome of the sequence of events (the ‘laws’ of which he finds‘ready-made’), and beyond the adroit evasion of disruptive ‘accidents’ by means of protective devices and preventive measures (which are based in their turn on the recognition and application of similar laws). (Lukács 1919:np)

This passage is interesting for its reference to

‘accidents,’ which capital must indeed evade in the case of

factory production, for such disruptions put the break on

profit-making. In Foodopoly, farmer and activist Wynonah

Hauter explains how industrial food lobbies work to limit

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the oversight of production lines by the USDA, “because if

[inspectors] saw contamination, they could stop the line and

thereby cut industry profits” (2012:120). The use of

predominately paper accounting methods like the US-initiated

‘hazard analysis and critical control points’ system (HACCP)

are intended to keep production lines moving with little

human intervention, which as I will show, bears some

responsibility for the far-reaching effects of the 2013

horse meat adulteration scandal in Europe.

Capital’s subsumption of food production processes, its

imperatives of acceleration and also obsolescence, register

in the food products themselves. Animal protein offers some

salient examples for this point. For one, the animals

themselves are bred under conditions that accelerate their

growth, and in the case of McDonald’s, to increase the size

of the chicken’s breast meat, so that chickens can barely

stand up under their own weight and are prone to heart

failure (Hauter 2012:206). And consider the degree to which

meat is ground up, recombined, and submitted to ammonia

washes intended to baptize meat of the sins of industrial

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production. In 2012, reports about lean finely textured beef

used as a filler in beef products and American school

lunches gave us the colloquial term ‘pink slime’ (Avila

2012) and a horrific picture of the real subsumption of

edible matter under capital. The process for producing lean

finely textured beef has been described as follows:

First, a conveyer belt brought in scraps left over from a plant next door that produces steaks, roasts and other cuts of meat. The scraps were heated to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit to facilitate separation of the fat, then dumped into a huge meat grinder to pull out fat, cartilage, bone and connective tissue. A centrifuge spinning 3,000 timesa minute continued the separation process. Inside a third machine the material was treated with ammonia hydroxide gas to eliminate bacteria. (Stern 2012)

In the same article (Stern 2012), the production

facility is described as running automatically, watched

over by humans who merely act as the conscious linkages

of the process, to use Marx’s words (1973:692), though I

imagine the workers as rather unconscious or

contemplative in the Lukácsian sense.

Marx discusses how under capital, one industry

revolutionizes another, subjecting related branches of

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production to the same imperatives. This is an aspect of

subsumption. According to Eric Schlosser (2005:140), when

Keystone Foods began portioning chickens for the manufacture

of McDonald’s chicken nuggets (originally introduced in

1983) the groundwork was laid for the sale of chicken in

portions to the public,4 who had previously tended towards

the purchase of whole chickens. I should also note, as

Schlosser shows, that fast food is itself a consequence of

the auto industry, where portable, hand-held food was

produced to suit the new driving lifestyle (2005:198). Here

is where capital’s logic of obsolescence (Marcuse

1964:47,170) enters the sphere of individual consumption.

I locate the phenomena of obsolescence in the single-

use, individually portioned convenience foods marketed to us

as the solution for our busy, atomized lives under capital.

As previously mentioned, meat products are sold to us in

smaller portions, pointing to the loss of traditional

knowledge that came with preparing foods that provided for

and kept for more than one day, and techniques for extending4 “[T]oday about 90 percent of the chicken sold in the United States hasbeen cut into pieces, cutlets, or nuggets” (2005:140).

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the use of the bones and offal banished from supermarket

products. Moreover, in no-cook products of the microwave or

oven-ready variety, the preparation process is itself

accelerated. While control may be an element in food

production, in the realm of consumption or individual

reproduction, it takes the form of dependence—on these fast

foods to satisfy our most basic needs, and to make up for

the degree to which the average person has lost traditional

cooking knowledge. Obsolescence feeds back into production

and circulation, as demand for ready-made products increases

and because individuals are required to purchase food

commodities more often. Though the relation may seem

oblique, I apply the concept of obsolescence to food matter

as well as the traditional lifeways associated with its

preparation, for the matter itself has shed its other uses

(ritual, even didactic5) and become an object of instant

gratification only.

5 Didactic may not be the right word here, but what I am trying to articulate is that certain knowledges are presumed necessary in the preparation of foods when they are bought in whole form, especially raw meats. The didactic element can be extended to food which acts as a substratum for the transition of knowledge of one person to another, as a parent teaches a child how to prepare it.

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Domination, Durability, and Distance

In the reification of labour processes, a historical

precondition and formal outcome of mature capitalism, human

resistance to capital is broken down (Marx 1976:591), a

subject to which the latter chapters of Capital, Vol. I are

dedicated. Marx similarly describes how capital must break

down the resistance of nature, which is a parallel phenomena

beginning with man’s domination of his own nature as

described by Adorno and Horkheimer.

As soon as man discards his awareness that he himself is nature, all the aims for which he keeps himself alive—social progress, the intensification of all his material and spiritual powers, even consciousness itself—are nullified, and the enthronement of the means as an end, which under late capitalist is tantamount to open insanity, is already perceptible in the prehistory of the subjectivity. Man’s domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken. (2002a:54)

Similarly, in the 1844 manuscripts, the Marx describes a

process whereby man becomes capital, and as capital, becomes

indifferent to the content of his labour (1964:123) which in

reality, culminates in a disregard for use-value and

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material life itself even on the part of the worker. “The

existence of capital is [the worker’s] existence, his life;

as it determines the tenor of his life in a manner

indifferent to him” (Marx 1964:120).

The worker individually pursues her survival in the

production process, but her laboring activity has no

relation to that end and is in fact counterintuitive to

life. Though capital may serve the needs of the human, this

is merely accidental, for capital is blind to all purpose

(or final causes6) but its own purpose of self-valorization.

Adorno and Horkheimer take up the same thematic but

explicate the mediation of human needs by capital in far

more fatalistic language. They characterize this mediation

as a form of domination: “The irrationalism of

totalitarianism capitalism, whose way of satisfying needs

has an objectified form determined by domination which makes

the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the

6 “The quantification of nature, which led to its explication in terms of mathematical structures, separated reality from all inherent ends and, consequently, separated the true from the good, science from ethics. No matter how science may now define the objectivity of nature and the interrelations among its parts, it cannot scientifically conceive it in terms of ‘final causes’” (Marcuse 1964:108).

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extermination of mankind” (2002a:55). Later, I will discuss

how extermination takes on several forms in the context of

Monsanto: not only does the company’s ‘terminator seed’

affect the reproductivity of plant material, extinguishing

its natural potential; but its history is riddled with

farmers suffering financial disaster and choosing death as

the one unnamed option that remains where capital governs

life.

While the formal subsumption of agricultural labour was

capital’s first basis of accumulation, industrial

agriculture represents a pivotal moment in capital’s real

subsumption of matter and our food. By industrializing

agriculture, capital aims to break down the resistance posed

by natural systems to its valorization: their vulnerability

to drought and pest, variability in yield, and even their

temporality. Interestingly, Marx states that the overcoming

of nature’s barriers to optimal productivity is far more

significant to the development of capitalism than merely

profiting from an already fertile ground. He says,

it by no means follows…that the most fertile soil is the

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most fitted for the growth of the capitalist mode of production. The latter presupposes the domination of manover nature… It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economizing on its energy, of appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by…that plays the most decisive role in the history of industry. (Marx 1976:649)

Like the human worker, the resistance that natural

reproductive systems pose to capital’s valorization process

are broken down, first through a process of formal

subsumption (e.g. land enclosures) and finally by real

subsumption (e.g. the application of chemical fertilizers,

thresher and picker machines, GM seeds). Capital cannot

abide the reproductive autonomy of humans or nature and must

forcibly appropriate their reproductive capacities.

The following passage from Grundrisse, though not

referring specifically to real subsumption, offers a

description that could arguably apply to the subsumption of

matter as it occurs in industrial processes. Marx says,

No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle link between the object and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. (1973:705)

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The discovery of the role nitrogen and phosphorus plays in

plant reproduction, for example, inspired the development of

chemical fertilizers to intensify production, i.e. a natural

process formally subsumed by capital is then transformed

into an industrial process, and thus really subsumed. By

accelerating and increasing the productivity of soil,

capital is working to achieve its endgame, to be free and

thus “independent of every natural limitation” (Marx

1964:124), while in reality, it is a snake eating its own

tail: depleting natural deposits of nitrogen in the soil and

replacing it with oil-based synthetics—unsustainable

processes fueled with unsustainable resources. “Individual,

non-quantifiable qualities stand in the way of an

organization of men and things in accordance with the

measurable power to be extracted from them” (Marcuse

1964:120). Capital operates on the basis of abstraction,

which Marcuse reminds us “is a historical event in a

historical continuum. It proceeds on historical grounds, and

it remains related to the very basis from which it moves

away: the established societal universe” (1964:100) as well

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as its physical environment. But capital can never fully

move away from its material basis. Its contradictory drive

to do so is a negating force for capital and the human,

whose abstract labour is the substance of value (Marx

1976:131).

Food regime theory: distance and durability

My overall project concerning food may be considered

dialectical. Dialectics is, for my purposes, the method of

relating food commodities and their production to capitalist

society as a whole, revealing their actual function as

objects of value, control, and dependence in addition to

their ideological, physiological, and ritual roles in social

reproduction. I am preceded in this project by the body of

work known as food regime theory, which provides some

interesting thematic points for my analysis.

Harriet Friedmann (1993, 2005), a key figure in food

regime theory, identified two major food regimes in the

mature and late periods of capitalism. The first predates

the world wars and corresponds to the late imperial age and

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19th century capitalism. The first food regime developed

global food markets and established what Friedmann calls

‘ecologies at a distance’ (Campbell 2009:313), a concept

evocative of Marx’s metabolic rift (see Foster et al. 2011),

a point to which I will return. The 2nd, post-war regime was

characterized by high-input, outsourced, industrial

agriculture and an emphasis on cheap produce. Phillip

McMichael added an additional characterization to this

regime, calling it ‘Food from Nowhere,’ because it tends to

obscure “the social, geographical, economic and technical

bases of its production regime” (Campbell 2009:311). The

second regime ushered in a new kind of food commodity

rendered increasingly durable and able to travel long

distances, according to the ever increasing spatial orbit of

capital’s circulation. The Food from Nowhere regime was

bolstered by the development of refrigeration, e.g. opening

up American beef from Chicago to other regional markets

(Fraser and Rimas 2010:151), or New Zealand mutton and lamb

to the UK. Canning and packaging innovation continued to

challenge the limits of our normally ephemeral foodstuffs.

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Durability and distance, argues Friedmann, were key

characteristics of both the first and second food regimes,

but as we will see, these take on new meaning under

contemporary capitalist conditions of food production.

Durability has long been desired as a quality in

tradable produce. According to Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas

(2010:55), the durability of grain in storage and transit

sustained the Roman Empire—carrying with it Roman imperial

relations to the empire’s limits similar to how capitalist

relations are reproduced through the circulation of food

commodities today. As Hugh Campbell (2009) shows, the trade

of durable commodities of grain, lumber, and animal protein

shaped supply chains and global food relations in the 1st

food regime, while grain and meat continue to act today as

sites of intensive capitalist accumulation and a means of

expanding and enfolding markets. The durability of products

better suits the commodity form because it is more likely to

endure in transit or storage until it can realize its value

in exchange. As Marx writes in Capital, Vol. II, perishable

commodities that are not sold within a definite time and

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spoil as a result “lose, together with their use-value, the

property of being bearers of exchange value” (1978:206).

Global food production has also worked to ensure a constant

supply of off-season produce, giving the illusion that food

has become ‘non-seasonal.’ Through technologies of seed

modification, cooling and preserving, expanded supply

chains, and “through the management of archipelagos of

plantations across the global South” (McMichael 2009:150),

consumers have gained year-round access to produce. The oft-

cited transgenic tomato is a perfect example of this trend.7

Durability lends itself to Friedmann’s other concept,

distance. With improvements in storage and processing

techniques, food commodities gain new spatio-temporal

qualities and are able to bear exchange-value over longer

periods of time and distances. Lukács’ description of the

disunity of commodity production contextualizes these

7 In the 1990s, transgenic technology was introduced to delay the ripening of tomatoes so they could survive in transit, a technique sinceapplied to papayas from South East Asia and melons from the United States (“Delayed Ripening Technology” 2014). The skin of the tomatoes isbred to be harder so that they survive the conditions of long-distance travel and so that they are ripe when they reach the market. A similar technique was proposed for apples in a 2009 patent, that would genetically modify the fruit so that it does not bruise, staving off theapples natural oxidation processes (Armstrong and Lane 2009).

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spatio-temporal peculiarities in the context of the

technical division of labour.

The unity of a product as a commodity no longer coincides with its unity as a use-value: as society becomes more radically capitalistic the increasing technical autonomy of the special operations involved in production is expressed also, as an economic autonomy, as the growing relativisation of the commodity character of a product at the various stages of production. It is thus possible to separate forcibly the production of a use-value in time and space. (Lukács 1919:np)

If we take the popular product Nutella, we can see that its

production is carried out thus across time and space (Figure

1), though it belies its global character.

The food processing company Ferrero International SAis headquartered in Luxembourg and currently has tenfactories producing Nutella: five are located in theEuropean Union, one in Russia, one in Turkey, one inNorth America, one in South America and one in Australia. Some inputs are mainly locally supplied, for example the packaging or some of the ingredientslike skimmed milk. There are however ingredients that are globally supplied: hazelnuts come mainly from Turkey, palm oil from Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Brazil, cocoa mainly from Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Ecuador, sugar mainly from Europeand the vanilla flavour from the United States and Europe. (Backer and Miroudet 2013:17)

The commodity is divided as a use-value and exchange-value,

certainly, but is first subject to the divisive process of

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production, which in itself, may be characterized by various

moments of production, distribution, and circulation before

culminating in the seemingly unitary use-value that appears

on store shelves.

Figure 1: Nutella’s global value chain Durability and distance in food production are also

complicit in certain forms of global governance or

exploitation, e.g. when countries become import dependent on

other countries, as they permit the protraction of

corporate-national networks beyond the local, regional

sphere, which once was the limit of trade in perishable

goods. Adorno and Horkheimer are interesting on the point of

distance, which they say is necessary for domination

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(2002a:13). Edmund Jephcott’s translation of The Dialectic of

Enlightenment rather says that ‘abstraction’ is predicated on

distance and does not use the term ‘domination’: “The

distance of subject from object, the presupposition of

abstraction, is founded on the distance from things which

the ruler attains by means of the ruled” (Adorno and

Horkheimer 2002b:9). This is unproblematic because

abstraction is likewise a force of domination for Adorno and

Horkheimer.

Biotechnology: control at a distance

In Biotechnology in Development (2008), Guido Ruivenkamp

posits the phenomena of ‘appropriation’ and ‘substitution’

as pivotal moments in the industrialization of agriculture,

the former referring both to the appropriation of land but

also to “the gradual take-over of controllable biological

activities” (2008:35). Substitution refers to the tendency

to replace the agrarian origin of food sources with

“products of industrial-biochemical methodology” (2008:35).

Examples that Ruivenkamp provide are the replacement of

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butter by margarine or of the substitution of high fructose

corn syrup (HFCS) for cane sugar. The consequences of these

phenomena is a profound lack of local control over methods

of food production, as farmers are increasingly “integrated

into the international network of agro-industrial production

chains” (2008:36).

Substitutability has greater applicability in the case

of agricultural products such as maize, which not only

provides cheap inputs for many manufactured food products in

the form of HFCS or processed food stabilizers (Homsey

2000), but is also widely used as feed in industrial meat

production, and produced for biofuels and plastics. Thus,

Ruivenkamp also discusses the increasingly flexible and

“interchangeable production units [made for] companies that

assemble food components at an international level, and

combine and transform them into foods at the local level”

(2008:44). Ruivenkamp’s concepts of appropriation and

substitutability intersect in the maize seed: as one of the

most ubiquitous genetically modified organisms on the

planet, it represents an important sight of appropriation

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and subsumption for capital, where the genome itself is

stamped with capital’s imperatives. Likewise, maize and

similar products like soy are becoming near-universal

substitutes for other raw or naturally occurring materials.

Capital favours those commodities most amenable to

multiplying themselves in the production of other

commodities and multiplying the points of exchange

throughout the food supply chain (from production, to

manufacturing, to retail). Through the “leveling domination

of abstraction” capital aims to make “everything in nature

repeatable” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002a:13).

While Ruivenkamp describes various scenarios where

biotechnology is used as a means of domination, he remains

optimistic about the liberatory potential of

biotechnologies, which would involve tailoring the

technology for regional and local necessities and

socializing the knowledge from which bioscience companies

currently profit. However, this is only possible if this

form of biopower is given back to peasant communities rather

than being used as a force of exploitation. Local and global

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food sovereignty movements such as Via Campesina agitate and

educate in order to achieve agrarian reform, but with more

and more countries adopting seed laws that criminalize the

(ancient) tradition of seed saving, it is difficult to

imagine when, if ever, this transition will take place. As

of this writing, the Canadian House of Commons has passed

the Agricultural Growth Act (Bill C-18), which according to

a November 24, 2014 press release will “update and modernize

existing legislation to respond to the latest technology and

international practices” (English 2014). Moving next to the

Senate, the bill would amend the current language governing

plant breeder’s rights to conform with UPOV8 ’91, a

convention unilaterally used by agro-industrial companies to

demand royalties from farmers, make it illegal to save

seeds, and prosecute farmers who are seen to have infringed

on private property rights of seed patent holders like

Monsanto (Walker 2014; GRAIN 2014; National Farmers Union

2013).

To return to Adorno and Horkheimer’s statement relating8 The French acronym for the International Convention for the Protectionof New Varieties of Plants.

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distance to domination, Ruivenkamp discusses how the

privatization of seeds allows corporations to enforce

‘control at a distance,’ and this in turn can be linked to

abstraction:

Thanks to the scientific information built into them, these [bioengineered] products discipline cultivation practices in various regions, setting upa new system of power relationships based on controlof agricultural production at a distance by the research products and in particular by their immaterial content. (2008:38-9)

Control at a distance is maintained by virtue of

agriculture’s ‘informationalization’ (Ruivenkamp 2008:36),

which abstracts away from the materiality of food products

and the conditions under which they are produced. Ruivenkamp

also refers to genetically engineered organisms as

‘politicized’ products (2008:26). Marcuse spoke similarly

about the implicit political character of technological

change: “The technological a priori is a political a priori

inasmuch as the transformation of nature involves that of

man, and inasmuch as the ‘man-made

creations’ issue from and reenter a societal ensemble”

(Marcuse 1964:113). The private character of technological

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enterprise allows Monsanto, for example, to prosecute

farmers whose fields have been contaminated by cross-

pollination because the incidental products reveal their

illicit heritage in their genetic information. Monsanto’s

Technology Use Guide stipulates that farmers who are not

growing crops using their products must still be “aware of

the planting intentions of his or her neighbor” (Food and

Water Watch 2013:13) and will be held liable in instances of

cross-contamination, despite the farmer’s complete lack of

control over her situation.

Where farmers have willingly attached themselves to

Monsanto, they quickly find themselves enmeshed in cycles of

debt, forced to buy the costly patented seeds every year as

their genetic programming amount to making them technically

obsolescent: a high-yield crop is only guaranteed with the

original seed, consistently performing at lower-than

competitive rates when the reproduced seed is planted

(Malone 2008). Obsolescence is a factor of the real

subsumption of matter under capital. “Objects…persist only

as ‘convenient  intermediaries,’ as obsolescent ‘cultural

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posits’” (Marcuse 1964:110), which in this case, perpetuate

Monsanto’s control over its customers. These relationships

are far from profitable for the farmers and increasingly

fatal. In India’s Maharashtra state, the so-called suicide

belt, farmers are taking their lives at a rate of 1,000

every month (Malone 2008).9 Describing the death of his

brother, one man said:

He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here. (Malone 2008)

There is no imperative guiding Monsanto to create

sustainable technologies or to consider the ethical

implications of their products. As Marcuse says, science

makes no commitment to substance (1964:112). In a sense,

capital must commit to substance, but only insofar as it

requires a material form in which to circulate and in order

to accumulate. It is rather the legal nature of the patent

that grants its owner powers to expand its sphere of

9 A 2014 headline indicates that Maharashtra state continues to bear thedistinction of having the most farmer suicides per year (Dahat 2014).

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exploitation.

The company or research institution that is granted a patent on a…product gains an exclusive right to bring about certain social changes, to control a certain key process at a distance or to make certainagricultural materials interchangeable. (Ruivenkamp 2008:45)

Remarkably, these organizations also have the power to make

different global regions interchangeable, imposing on them

the production of cash crops like maize and soy where they

would not naturally be viable. Global food production is

proof that in “the medium of technology, man and nature

become fungible objects of organization” (1964:123).

Dialectics and risk in capitalist food production

Distance is a factor of the metabolic rift which Marx

described as a divorce between humans and the ecological

systems that sustain them and capital. Metabolic rift is

summarized by McMichael as

the subordination of agriculture to capitalist production relations, that is, the progressive transformation of agricultural inputs [into] inorganic commodities), reducing nutrient recycling in and throughthe soil and water, and introducing new agronomic methods dependent upon chemicals and bioengineered seedsand genetic materials produced under industrial

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conditions. (2009:161)

Friedmann suggests that this rift has prodigious

repercussions—for example, foodborne illnesses like mad cow

disease (Campbell 2009:314) and E. coli, and more recently,

an increasing risk of antibiotic resistance. These moments

are revelatory in a dialectical sense, exacerbating the

power struggle between consumers, producers, and retailers

over food production and distribution, and inspiring social

movements counterpoised to the Food from Nowhere regime.

When the negative effects of industrial food production

are seen to impact the embodied health of consumers, the so-

called externalities of industrial food production become

internal, intimate. Rather, what these events show is that

the risks and associated with capitalist food production are

endogenous, always already internal to the process, despite

the rational checks integrated in the system. A

technologically rational view takes risks to be external,

but as Adorno and Horkheimer argue, these risks are courted

by capital: “the possibility of failure becomes the

postulate of a moral excuse for profit” (2002a:62). Only

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when the unintended but internally cultivated consequences

of production threaten profit-making through product recalls

and decreased demand, does ‘food from nowhere’ come under

scrutiny. A distrust of science, food scares, and an

emerging discourse surrounding a nutrition crisis relating

both to obesity and malnutrition, have culminated in the

emergence of what McMichael calls the Food from Somewhere

regime (Campbell 2009:309), typified by EU labeling

standards and retailer guarantees. This provides new

marketing opportunities for retailers like Tesco, who bans

GM food from its own label10 foods, but stocks other brands

selling products that contain GM ingredients (Poulter 2013).

Published in 2009, McMichael is oblivious to the fact

that, even in the EU, where food regulation is considered to

be strongest, Food from Nowhere would rear its ugly, equine

head in the 2013 horse meat scandal. The high-input, low

cost Food from Nowhere paradigm revealed itself to be

operating at full strength despite the latest efforts of

supermarkets to stock ‘foods from somewhere’ and 10 I.e., in-house or generic brands. Other examples are Loblaw’s No Nameand Wal-Mart’s Great Value brands.

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particularly in the UK, foods sourced in Britain, which as

an import-heavy economy is near impossible to achieve.

Though the horsemeat adulteration was arguably benign,

in that no one became ill from it, the class implications

are striking. In a government-commissioned report on the

scandal, Chris Elliot (2013:12) observes that the poor are

more easily the victim of food scares as they are the most

likely to purchase and consume food produced under spurious

conditions. Of the scandal’s revelations, I found two most

compelling: one is that the EU was surveilling its supply

chain using HACCP (Blythman 2013), a paper accounting system

developed in the US that is effectively designed to keep

production lines running and inspectors off shop floors.

Consequently, 750 tons of horsemeat made it into over four

million beef products without being tested (Radio France

Internationale 2013). Second, the nature of the mechanically

separated horse meat, i.e. the degree to which it had been

processed, is what allowed it to be so easily substituted

for beef. Only DNA testing could distinguish the difference

(European Commission 2013).

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“In moments of crisis the qualitative existence of the

‘things’ that lead their lives beyond the purview of

economics as misunderstood and neglected things-in-

themselves, as use-values, suddenly becomes the decisive

factor” (Lukács 1919:np). While the mad cow controversy in

Britain, and more recently the EU horse meat scandal, draw

our attention to previously unarticulated relationships

within the capitalist mode of production, one must also

consider how fleeting or insignificant the events are in the

public consciousness. Their dialectic potential is lost if

people only react to the sensationalism of event, and not

actively to the underlying issue. “Perhaps an accident may

alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is

being done and what is being prevented subverts the

consciousness and the behaviour of man, not even a

catastrophe will bring about the change” (Marcuse 1964:11).

In fact one of McMichael’s observations is that despite the

public outcry inspired by these events, the Food from

Somewhere regime needs the Food from Nowhere regime to exist

(Campbell 2009:317); that these contradictory regimes shape

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and stabilize one another. Marcuse might point to this as a

leveling of antagonisms (1964:51), an effect of one-

dimensional society.

Conclusion

By undermining the sources of metabolic reproduction,

of human and nonhuman alike, capital also undermines its own

means of subsistence. Marx describes how capital’s

indifference to its content constitutes its own negation

and, inevitably, its end:

there is the production of the object of human activity as capital…in which the selfsame capital remains the same in the most diverse social and natural manifestations, totally indifferent to its real content. This contradiction, driven to the limit, is of necessity to the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole private-property relationship. (1964:122)

This contradiction is represented in the ecological

boogeyman of our generation: Monsanto’s terminator seed

(Hauter 2012:248). This patented technology, encloses and

subsumes the reproductive capacity of plant cultures in a

form totally fitting for capital while embodying the

contradictory potential of destroying plant reproductivity

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as such, therefore endangering the reproduction of the

labour power capital most relies on.

To close this analysis, I will discuss a final irony of

capitalism’s real subsumption of edible matter, and that is

the discourse surrounding the production and provision of GM

food as a means of feeding the world, or more specifically,

the developing world. Right now, debate about the merits of

biotechnologies carries on in countries like Zambia and

Zimbabwe, where food shortages are chronic, but opponents to

GM food see a greater risk posed to their food sovereignty

(Dowty and Wallace 2010; Mwando 2012; Stieber 2013). The

population question is often deployed as a rationale in this

context. For Jacqui Dibden, et al (2013), GM food is framed

as a ‘moral imperative’ not unlike the way that land-

improving schemes were framed in 17th century England.

Meiksins Wood (2002) argues that in this time, the

introduction of market imperatives of production and profit

laid the foundation for capital’s subsumption of

agricultural processes and provided justification for

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colonial land grabs, for instance in Ireland.11

Resistance to GM foods is characterized by food

sovereignty movements and considers the very real

possibility not only that GM seeds may damage reproductivity

of natural systems, as is feared with Monsanto’s terminator

seed, but may also push other alternatives out of the market

place (Dibden et al. 2013:69). If the market and government

spending favours GM solutions, other options may simply

become obsolete (Food and Water Watch 2013:14). In itself,

bioengineering has within it the potential to improve the

lives of individuals and feed at-risk populations, but only

conceivably where technology and knowledge is socialized and

where it is used to compliment rather than force out

traditional forms of agriculture. As Marcuse says, “science

and technology are the great vehicles of liberation, and…it

is only their use and restriction in the repressive society

which makes them into vehicles of domination” (1969:13-14).

11 The impetus to improve land and productivity was seen by English colonizers as a means of drawing the Irish out of their customary barbarism (Woods 2002:160). Notably, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of The Odyssey, rationalized food production is also the key characteristic separating the civilized Greeks from the barbaric Cyclopes (2002a:65).

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For Marcuse, liberation lies in the reorganization of

the technical basis of society towards the final cause of

humanity, survival, but in a way that does not predicate

life on survival, for this is how capital organizes life

even after “the potentialities of the system have outgrown

its institutions” (1964:157).

[T]he technical mastery of final causes is the construction, development, and utilization of resources (material and intellectual) freed from allparticular interests which impede the satisfaction of human needs and the evolution of human faculties.(Marcuse 1964:164-5)

What was significant to me in Marcuse’s theory is that

necessity is not something that can be eliminated entirely

and in a liberatory society, it actually forms the

possibility of freedom rather than being its opposite.

Marcuse says “the development of the productive forces

beyond their capitalist organization suggests the

possibility of freedom within the realm of necessity”

(1969:20). Marcuse envisions a society where human values

like freedom and truth are embedded in its technical

foundation and form the objective conditions of human life

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(1969:19), whereas now, the objective conditions of life

engenders only domination and scarcity.

But not much has changed since Marcuse urged us to join

the Great Refusal epitomized by the student and civil rights

movements of the 1960s. Automated technology, the surest

solution to reducing socially necessary labour, is still

predominantly directed toward the increase of relative

surplus value. And while Ruivenkamp points to the potential

of biotechnology, arguing that it can be used to empower

peasant farmers and for sustainable agricultural practices,

such a change requires that the impetus to privatize

knowledge be replaced by one to socialize knowledge. I

cannot but wonder where these new imperatives could or would

have space to develop, unless in cases of actual rupture (a

financial or natural disaster), which nevertheless would

require a certain preparatory practice in order to realize

decisive change when it is most feasible.12 Like Marcuse, I

see the need for a new morality or sensibility to develop in

12 Harry Cleaver makes a similar argument in The Uses of an Earthquake (1986)where he claims that the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 gave neighbourhood collectives with a history of autonomous struggle an opportunity to realize change.

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advance of revolutionary change, one that is receptive to

those moments of rupture which would grant us the space to

form and reproduce alternative and non-repressive social

relations. I also see a bridge being formed to these moments

through education and practice, a subject I explored

previously in a case study of Occupy Sandy, where the mutual

aid practices carried out during the park occupations of

2011 translated into a viable volunteer and resource

distribution network in the aftermath of 2012’s Superstorm

Sandy. I look forward to revisiting this case study in light

of my newfound familiarity with Marcuse’s work.

I would most like to see liberating practices address

the reclamation of food towards its human ends. This

necessarily requires new ways of seeing (Marcuse 1969:10)

which are ecological in nature, that is, if we are to

progress with the intention of providing for needs without

hurting (nonhuman) others (Marcuse 1969:9). Even Marcuse

sees a potential reclaimed through food, citing cooking and

cultivating food as aesthetic practices repressed under

capitalism (1969:27). More importantly, agro-industrial food

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production is the technical basis most in need of liberation

and transvaluation. In it lies the potential to reorganize

the realm of necessity in order to permit the realm of

freedom to take root. Without the liberation of our vital

needs from repressive structures, without the liberation of

the soil itself, freedom simply has no place to grow.

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