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자본주의는 어떻게 모든 것에 가격을 매기게 되었나.
How Capitalism Puts a Price on Everything
1.컬럼버스의 시각- 모든 자연물에 가격표 붙이기
In addition to Madeira, Christopher Columbus also serves as a leitmotif throughout the book reminding us of the consequences of producing cheap things. Quoting from his journals and tellingly from the accounts of his colonizing expeditions, the authors summon up a monster who symbolizes the predatory character of capitalist production. They write:
At the core of these novel solutions was global conquest, not just by guns but also by making new frontiers, at once cultural and geographical. Life and land between money and markets became ways to treat and fix crises across the span of capitalism’s ecology. At the heart of this relation with nature lay profit, and its poster child is Christopher Columbus. Columbus, who crops up in every chapter as an early practitioner of each of the strategies of cheap things, came to the Caribbean with not just the conqueror’s gaze but an appraiser’s eye—one sharpened in Portuguese colonial adventures off the shores of North Africa. He launched a colonization of nature as pecuniary as it was peculiar. European empires, beginning with the Spanish and the Portuguese, obsessively collected and ordered Natural objects—including “savage” human bodies—always with an eye on enhanced wealth and power. Columbus’s cataloging of nature to evaluate (put a price on) it was an early sign that he understood what Nature had become under early modern capitalism.
2. 7가지 싸구려에 기반한 값싼 상품세계- 자본주의-의 탄생
As for the seven cheap things mentioned in the title, they consist of the raw material of class society from time immemorial: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. A major asset of “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things” is being able to show the connection between the ancient world and our world today in terms of how cheap things are produced and why. Suffice it to say that capitalism is based on the inexorable drive to cheapen everything. Food needs to be cheap in order to keep a factory worker alive, just as energy in the form of gasoline needs to be cheap to keep him or her mobile enough to get to work on time. When the price of energy overshoots a tolerable threshold, you get the Yellow Vests in France or the Caracazo uprising in Venezuela when gasoline prices rose by 100 percent over the weekend of February 25-26 in 1989. The capitalist class does not really care if producing sufficient quantities of gasoline will hasten the arrival of drought, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods that can kill millions. It can barely figure out how to manage its affairs until the end of 2020 so don’t expect them to be thinking about 2090, let alone the next three billion years on Earth until the sun burns itself out.
3.값싼 상품세계와 생태계 간의 모순- 마데리아의 예
As a paradigm of the co-dependency between ecological despoliation and the capitalist production of cheap commodities, Patel and Moore refer to the extraordinary history of the island of Madeira throughout the book. Known mostly today as a fortified wine that originated there, it was also a place where sugar was first produced at the expense of everything else on the island—including human beings and nature.
Madeira was a small island off the northern coast of Africa that in the 15th century became the first specimen of the kind of ruin now present on a global scale that the UN called attention to this year. In 1455, a traveler from Venice wrote that “there was not a foot of ground that was not covered by great trees.” (Madeira means “wood” in Portuguese). By 1530, the island had become entirely deforested. Initially, the trees provided the lumber for Portuguese ships with the denuded forest being turned into wheat fields that provided cheap food for the mother country. But the real engine of capitalist growth was in sugarcane production.
In the 1460s and 70s, wheat farmers on Madeira now began to grow sugar exclusively. Like the palm oil plantations in Indonesia and the Midwest’s soybean monoculture, forests were a hindrance to the production of cash crops. What started in Madeira soon spread to the New World, with islands like Jamaica and Barbados providing the sugar that became part of the triangle of early capitalism: sugar, rum and slavery.
Besides cutting down all the trees, the sugar barons on Madeira also rerouted the island’s rivers to supply irrigation to sugarcane fields, with African slaves providing the cheap labor needed to break through rock faces for irrigation channels. The trees that remained on the island were to be cut down to provide the fuel needed for the ovens that boiled and distilled sugarcane into molasses and sugar.
Once Madeira was turned into an ecological wasteland, the profiteers moved westward into the Caribbean and Brazil. As the authors point out, “capitalism didn’t leave Madeira—it reinvented itself.” They sum up the outcome: “Europe’s wealthy ate the sugar, and sugar at the island.”
4. 생태계 문제 해결을 위해 인구통제를 주장하는 신 맬더스주의는 인종주의
On the question of cheap nature, they warn against what amounts to a kind of neo-Malthusianism that presents in the form of ecological footprints, carrying capacity, etc. They write, “Overpopulation is, in other words, defined by a calculation of carrying capacity. To take these carrying capacities for granted is to blame future environmental destruction on the poor and working classes in the Global North and Global South as they struggle for some sort of parity with those who program the footprint calculator. Such Malthusian thinking makes despair inevitable, and inevitably racist.”
5.문제는 값싼 상품에 기초한 고도의 소비문화 자체에 있다
Hickel’s point is that even under the best of circumstances, in which the target is meeting the basic needs of countries using sustainable energy sources and development standards that would meet with the approval of Food First, there is simply a brick wall that will be hit before such goals are met.
Using data from a variety of well-established research institutions, he states:
Adopting a higher poverty line makes it more difficult to end poverty while remaining within planetary boundaries. At the US$7.40 line, Belarus is the most promising, with minimal social shortfall (a score of 0.98) excluding qualitative indicators, but its average biophysical score is 1.64. Of the nations that achieve all non-qualitative social thresholds, the most biophysically efficient is Oman, which has an average biophysical score of 2.66. In other words, given the existing best-case relationship between resource use and income, achieving a good life for all with an income threshold of US$7.40 per day would require that poor nations overshoot planetary boundaries by at least 64% to 166%.
원문 출처
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/31/how-capitalism-puts-a-price-on-everything/