Marx and the Dephysicalisation of the Landscape

Abstract

This chapter relies on Marx’s later critiques of capitalism (which focused on the relationship between property rights and nature) to explain the final hallmark of property: alienability. Using Marx's metabolic rift theory, the  chapter considers how the abstraction of land was achieved through the separation of culture and nature, which created distance between people and their embedded relations with land. This is illustrated with examples from rundale communities in Ireland and the slave colonies of the Caribbean. Converting landscapes to plantation monoculture to maximise exploitation  destabilised the landscape dynamic, facilitating displacement, oppression, and enslavement, and  socio-ecological crises such as the Famine. The chapter thus draws attention to the spatial consequences of land's dephysicalisation in property law.    

The conceptual shift towards dephysicalised property as connectivity with land was lost forms part of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx’s analysis of the negative impact of property rights on human communities through the rise of capitalism is contained in his major unfinished work Capital.¹ Saito notes that Marx’s critique of capitalism became increasingly ecological as he emphasised the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—that its profitability relied on the destruction of the source of its wealth (natural resources).² This is achieved through the disruption of the link between man and nature, or metabolic rift, explained thus:

Capitalist production… disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth… All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility… Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.³

The idea of an unalienated relationship between people and nature thus underscores Marx’s philosophy of property and critique of capitalism.⁴ A lived-in nature aligns with the landscape, though Marx never used this term and his work predates cultural geography. He did however see man as part of nature.⁵ Alienation was originally defined as alienation from community, and Marx deployed the concept in the sense of the effect of estrangement of humanity from their existence within nature as a result of civilisation, or capitalist society.⁶ Property was not land, but the ownership of it, and the alienable possession of land led to the ‘objectifying, abstracting and then absenting of land’—alienation’s dual nature meant it was both estrangement from land/nature and from other people.⁷ Alienation according to Graham is a relationship that became positivised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the prevalence of absolute private property. Modern property law erases the bilateral aspect of alienation, constructing alienation as agency and will: the person is an active alienating subject, and the land, the passive alienated object of the land market.⁸

For Marx, alienation is a result of the failure to recognise the human origin of objects produced by human activity, specifically their social origin, as products of co-operative social labour.⁹ Marx observed that prior to capitalism, labour reflected the mutuality of social relations in a community attuned to nature, based on roles assigned within the peasant family unit.¹⁰ When nature was valued solely through human labour and ownership, as a result of the transition to a capitalist economy, this extinguished the social relations of property.¹¹ Marx demonstrated his grasp of the significance of alienation when he articulated the full extent of the loss: the socio-cultural and environmental dimensions of property that once characterised the working landscape. Rendering land as abstract and alienable property therefore demanded the dephysicalisation of landscape, the separation of the socio-cultural (the communal bonds between people and the land) from the ecological, so that nature could be reduced to natural resources or raw material.

Marx thus described capitalism in terms of its capacity to destroy the ecosystem as well as human beings’ relationships with nature. The capitalist economy failed to recognise the impact of its accumulation of capital on the underlying ecological conditions of human existence; these are mere side-effects, external social and environmental costs.¹² The alienation of labour under capitalism has as its precondition the alienation of nature—the severance of human beings from the land, and from their natural environment.¹³ Labour, once a process between man and nature, became distorted in the capitalist commodity economy as the accumulation of capital is prioritised¹⁴: natural and human limits are exceeded, and human and social development ignored. There are numerous examples of the ecological devastation resulting from industrialised agriculture throughout the world,¹⁵ and Marx discussed Ireland in this context.¹⁶

As described earlier, the rundale system of land tenure is associated with traditional land practices that predated the conquest of Ireland. Following the arrival of the English, land became increasingly unavailable to the general population as Ireland was rearranged into estates that operated on a commercial basis.¹⁷ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, agriculture was characterised by extreme land subdivision and increasingly high rents, forcing traditional communities to relocate to the West of Ireland and adapt their land practices in order to survive in a harsher environment.¹⁸ During this period, the potato was introduced, and while communities initially flourished, the dependence on this crop and monocultural practices must be understood in the wider context of British mercantile colonialism,¹⁹ which expelled communities from their homes and set the stage for extinguishing communal bonds with land.²⁰

Through the rundale system, peasant communities were able to fairly distribute land, while paying rents to their landlords.²¹ Communal labour permeated all aspects of community life, and complex patterns of land use and distribution were preserved through lineage and kinship bonds, although these demonstrated flexibility as they were not exclusively patrilineal.²² Availability of land shaped these practices and modifications were introduced over time. The functioning landscape relied on gavelkind or partible inheritance. Gavelkind meant that all members of the rundale community had a right to access the land, which could not be alienated. This communal property relationship ensured equality of access for all communal members. The amount of arable land held by an individual member under the rundale communal conditions was never quantified by units of measurement such as acres or furlongs, but by the potential ecological output (or value) of the land area and the sharing out of its ecological output equally among the communal members.²³ The tradition of communal co-operation characterised all activities in the rundale communities: crops were planted, tended and harvested by communal labour, as were herding and peat cutting.²⁴ The mechanism for maintaining these crucial activities and authority for regulating access relied on the recognition of various kinship bonds.

The introduction of the potato allowed for the concentration of the population, as the crop could be grown on a quarter of the land required for wheat.²⁵ The well-nourished population significantly expanded, but access to land did not under the British estate system. The fertility of potato crop yields on smaller and smaller plots of land enabled population growth and accelerated subdivision of land to support ever-increasing numbers of families, furthering dependence on the potato. This put pressure on the rundale system and the gavelkind mode of inheritance.²⁶

Methods of destabilising connections to land were observable elsewhere in Ireland. Where other rundale systems were destroyed throughout Ireland to accommodate the creation of commercial estates, tenancy at will prevailed. This required peasants to bid against each other to obtain a lease, which drove up rents and created considerable land insecurity. Two forms of subtenancy, conacre and cottier, introduced peasant communities to wage–labour relations and cash cropping (markets). Cottier tenants agreed to pay a cash rent after a successful harvest of a key crop, such as wheat or oats, which was a means of increasing labour outputs into the production of food and cash crops, while conacre sublets supplemented cottier subtenancies, with more peasants and households subsisting on smaller plots of land.²⁷

The intensification of these practices and the limiting of options for communities relying on the rundale system exhausted the soil, making these landscapes vulnerable to socio-ecological crises such as the Famine.²⁸ For Marx, the primary issue was not the plant pathogen itself, but the social conditions that had paved the way for the Famine, that is, the entire history of the rack-renting system and the subsequent transformation of the socio-ecological subsistence base of Ireland.²⁹ In impacting soil fertility, the social, economic and political integrity of land was undermined.³⁰ In monopolising access to land, landlords were able to exploit the Irish by ‘rackrenting’ them.³¹ Both practices dismissed the natural limits of the land as communities had been undermined in their maintenance of these landscapes. Marx thus demonstrated that property rights could have implications for the physical limits of the environment.³² This could not be separated from the social relations communities developed in their interaction with the environment.

The devastation that the Famine wrought can be traced to the artificially created dependence on the potato, a decision characteristic of a colonial land policy that prompted drastic changes to the landscape, substituting capitalistic modes of production that relied on monoculture and absorption of all cultivable land. Monoculture and the resultant Famine reflected particular understandings of land at odds with its natural limits and the communal bonds communities formed with the environment. The laissez faire approach to the economy promoted beliefs that the Famine was a natural phenomenon, and its adherents advocated a policy of non-intervention in order to allow for ‘market adjustments’.³³ The practices and policies accompanying legal transfer of land in Ireland were thus never attuned to the rhythms of the landscape. Colonial land transfers were antithetical to the traditional way of life, and distorted the internal dynamic of the landscape that communities had relied upon for common survival. Ecosystems were pushed to their limits, as decisions were made that exhausted the soil, and communities were also destroyed through the pressures on communal land regimes, or dependence on land practices such as rack renting that were asynchronous with the local landscape.

Following the Famine, the loss of lives and high emigration facilitated the consolidation and commercialisation of land to reduce dependence on the potato.³⁴ Gavelkind gave way to primogeniture to avoid subdivision of holdings by partible inheritance, which also transformed kinship and marriage practices.³⁵ The Famine and industrialised agriculture eliminated the need for an institution to negotiate and divide lots in a manner that ensured equitable access for the community, as these communities had been dispersed or destroyed. Changing the way communities thought about land had changed the communities themselves. Embracing private property was therefore influenced by subdivision and potato dependence, as a result of the reorganisation of Ireland into commercial estates following the conquest.³⁶ Key to the development of the plantation economy was access to land: the displacement of communities facilitated the destruction of traditional tenure. The displacement of peasant communities to marginal areas in the West of Ireland gradually severed their relationship with the land. Eventually, the communal mode of production disappeared, replaced by the capitalised agrarian sector. The conditions for the rejection of traditional tenure, however, were not inevitable outcomes of the working landscape, but the deliberate results of propertisation meant to detach communities from the land.

The commercialisation of land disrupted the existence of communities in tandem with the rhythms of local ecosystems. It was antithetical to the communal land ethos. Commercialisation encouraged subdivision, the introduction of conacre and cotter tenancies, priming the landscape for dissolution by making the subsistence base fragile, and the practice by colonial authorities of non-intervention during the Famine hastened the eradication of institutions and practices used to manage the land under rundale. Exceeding the limits of Irish land capacity accelerated agrarian production, but had devastating consequences for the soil, and the population. This was possible because ideas surrounding land as a subject of the market enabled the dismissal of land’s natural limits and function as a medium for social connectivity for its traditional communities. This was a harbinger of the Famine, the dissolution of rundale, the rearrangement of peasant communities, and the consolidation of land under commercially oriented farmers.³⁷ The disappearance of the lineage mode of production signified the erasure of forms of labour defined by the interaction of nature, and social relations dependent upon these modes of labour. With the introduction of a new class structure, the agrarian society in Ireland was transformed. Cooperation and equity gave way to competition and increasingly individualised conceptions of land, which facilitated commodity production.³⁸ Dephysicalisation of land thus commodified people–place relations, defined solely by market exchange values.³⁹

Underscoring the extent of alienation in the dephysicalised landscape is the complete dehumanisation of peoples who are disembodied in nature, thus becoming property themselves. Marx conceived of human beings as ‘corporeal’ beings, constituting a ‘specific part of nature’.⁴⁰ The expropriation of nature on behalf of the capitalist class becomes the basis for the further expropriation and exploitation of humanity and nature, in a vicious cycle leading ultimately to a rupture in the metabolism of nature and society.⁴¹ This is particularly evident in the slave colonies of the English-speaking Caribbean.

Marx observes that alienation commodifies not just land, but people. If land is no longer a landscape or place, then it follows that it is no longer peopled. Marx noted that in a world without people and without place, there are only things.⁴² This explains the comfort with which genocide was deployed as a policy in the Americas, as well as the creation of slave colonies in the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans as racialised chattel slaves were deprived of their humanity in the law. Planters drew slave supplies from Africa, which was home to diverse peoples of different linguistic, cultural and social backgrounds, which aided cultural assimilation and erasure in the New World.⁴³ Because enslaved Africans were so far removed from their places of origin, they were truly ‘natally alienated’, a phrase introduced by Orlando Patterson,⁴⁴ because they were alienated from their homeland, community and each other.

Enslaved Africans also had no connection to the Caribbean islands or the plantations in which they laboured. As strangers in a new land, with which they had no natural relationship, they were truly foreign. Marx’s concept of human beings as part of nature demonstrates the mode by which enslaved Africans would be denied their humanity, as they belonged nowhere: neither Africa, nor the Caribbean. Natal alienation is therefore best understood as alienation from land.⁴⁵ This is the ‘double injustice inherent in the slave-based plantation system: the denial of ownership of the land and the resulting denial of an identity, of a self, of an existence in the world’.⁴⁶ The commodification and fetishism of things through the prioritisation of exchange relations, resulting from the abstraction of land, things and people, reaches its nadir in the Caribbean, where the acceleration of capitalism required maximal exhaustion of nature and people.⁴⁷

The ecosystems of the Caribbean were central to the region’s transformation into slave colonies. A number of commodities that were in high demand in Europe, such as sugar, could not be grown locally. Sugar required certain climatic factors, and along with an assortment of plantation crops drove the evolution of the Atlantic plantation system, accelerated the growth of the slave trade, and anchored empire, particularly in Britain.⁴⁸ Caribbean geography would prove essential to sugar cultivation.⁴⁹ The Caribbean colonies, as islands, were surrounded by the sea, and also had surface water, so plantations could rely on river channels for transporting goods.⁵⁰ Plantations demand vast areas of land, and the coastal tropical lowlands that were not densely populated proved an ideal fit. These lowlands were not permanently settled, but important to Amerindians who practiced shifting cultivation, a specific land use not immediately familiar to the arriving Europeans.⁵¹ Improvement ideology had made its way to this region, as only those practicing settled agriculture could be considered legally entitled to claim sovereign rights over land, to improve it and optimise agricultural yields. The semi-nomadic Amerindian cultures,⁵² who believed in a common or clan perception of landscape⁵³ were therefore subject to expropriation and colonisation.

Plantation agriculture in the Caribbean thus reassembled the landscapes of Amerindian peoples, and had catastrophic consequences for local ecosystems. The widespread conversion of these landscapes to plantations was fueled by perceptions of the Caribbean landscape as paradise, incapable of despoliation, and offering an eternal bounty of natural resources.⁵⁴ In some cases for small islands, the entire land mass could be deemed suitable for sugar cultivation. Capital-intensive plantation agriculture that was based on slave labour promoted detrimental environmental change in terms of deforestation, soil erosion, flooding, gullying, local aridification and drying up of streams and rivers.⁵⁵ The extreme land use and patterns of timber clearance made species recovery all but impossible, since their Native habitats were being transformed into sugar plantations.⁵⁶ In addition, transformations in industrial technology in the form of sugar mills and transport such as rail and shipping and associated port infrastructure were necessary to support the new industry.⁵⁷ At the end of the plantation agriculture period (1665–1833) in the English-speaking Caribbean, the lowland environment had been entirely depleted of nutrients and invaded by alien species.⁵⁸

Natural resources were manipulated in such a manner as to entrench the planter/slave power dynamic,⁵⁹ which demanded permanent disruption of socio-ecological linkages in land. Over time, Amerindian peoples had been replaced by indentured European and then enslaved African labour. Enslaved populations existed to support the plantation system, which monopolised all natural resources. Enslaved Africans’ association with nature therefore reaffirmed their lack of humanity, as their relationship with the land defined the extent of their oppression and exploitation. As legal property, they were chattels of the sugar estate, distinguishable from indentured labour, who could be freed and potentially acquire land. This racial distinction in the law, between enslaved Africans and Irish indentured servants, is first made in Barbados and exported thereafter throughout the British Empire.⁶⁰ A communal base was denied to enslaved Africans—they were not allowed to organise or form their own neighbourhoods. There were near insurmountable obstacles to the development of strong and well-defined societies in the Caribbean as the result of colonialism and the plantation system.⁶¹ The decimation of Amerindians in the region (socially and politically) removed a common cultural base from which a population could rebuild and reassert itself, and enslaved Africans from diverse ethnicities and linguistic backgrounds was unable under the traumatic conditions of slavery to interact on their own terms and form sustainable communities.⁶² Race and space are therefore implicated in the creation of property rights by emphasising detachment from nature in the law, a detachment that is accomplished through dispossession, genocide and dehumanisation.

The contrast between the slave-owner and the enslaved could not be starker when considered in spatial terms. The small planter elite, in the words of the historian Richard S. Dunn, ‘held the best land, sold the most sugar, and monopolised the best offices. In only one generation these planters had turned their small island into an amazingly effective sugar-production machine and had built a social structure to rival the tradition-encrusted hierarchy of old England’.⁶³ Slave-owners, therefore, possessed spatial privileges in these islands as they held all property rights in land and labour, while slaves were physically emplaced but held no rights to exist outside the law.

Nevertheless, the population disparities concerned the white elite, who were surrounded by an enslaved majority. This encouraged the practice of absenteeism amongst the most powerful members of the plantocracy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁶⁴ A buffer class of professional ‘book-keepers’ (managers) and overseers was created to manage these estates. They in turn were motivated to maximise plantation profits in order to escape the region and retire home to Britain. This reinforced the perception that the region was ‘uninhabitable’, as there were no ‘reassuring social and psychological boundaries of traditional societies’.⁶⁵

Absentee slave-owners therefore were not even required to be in place or protect place while they owned land, sometimes multiple plantations across several islands. They held total control over the land, and the privileges that came with ownership, voting in the colonial legislatures, while living in England. It was to their benefit as property-owners that these slave colonies were not functioning places, and this dynamic was maintained to accrue and entrench their wealth. By contrast, enslaved populations were very much emplaced, shaping the land and developing complex enduring relations with the landscape, but their lived-in experiences found no formal expression in the law as they were owned rather than possessing ownership rights themselves. This dynamic has set the stage for modern capitalism’s affinity with abstract property rights, often at the expense of lived-in landscapes and their inhabitants.

Public authorities entrenched the power of the plantocracy, even in their absence, because their sole function was to perpetuate the plantation system, which included regulation of life and work on the estates, and to ensure above all else that the enslaved population never challenged the status quo.⁶⁶ Legislation could not maximise profitability of plantation production and ensure the welfare of plantation labour at the same time.⁶⁷ It was thus antithetical to the survival of the slave colonies for legislation to recognise the humanity of the slaves. ‘The common law of England is the common law of the plantations’, wrote the Admiralty’s legal counsel, Richard West, in 1720.⁶⁸ That law deployed property rights as an ordering mechanism, unmaking landscapes and human interactions with nature in the process, which facilitated the degradation of both humanity and the environment.

Because no attention was paid to land as a base for human subsistence and identity, it was recognised only in terms of its market value. The dephysicalisation of land as vacuous space or paradise extinguished pre-existing Amerindian property rights in favour of private land ownership for the planter elite. Colonial property rights therefore facilitated the translation of these landscapes into property as we know it today and concretised particular cultural perceptions of land, nature and race so that they favoured maximum exploitation of people and the environment.

In critiquing capitalism and its impact through property rights on the natural limits of the land and the survival of mankind, Marx was in fact addressing the sustainability of property.⁶⁹ He articulated the costs of alienation that Bentham and Hohfeld never considered. He highlighted the underlying factors of spiritual estrangement, community displacement and environmental collapse that accompanied the dual process of alienation, severing nature from culture. That alienation is no longer considered a rupture in the fabric of the landscape, but a process of agency, helmed by individual property owners who can alienate tradeable rights in land, demonstrates the successful dephysicalisation of the landscape. Marx never referred to the term landscape, but in recognising local ecological limits, he considered the spatial consequences of alienation on communities that were dispossessed or displaced from the nature to which they belonged. Such a treatment is absent in Hohfeldian property theory where property is an abstract right.

Exceeding the limits of Irish land’s natural capacity had devastating consequences leading to the Famine. The policy of non-intervention, reflected in laws and practices at the time, conceived of soil exhaustion as natural shocks in the economy, which would right itself in due course. No attention was paid to land as the basis for cultural life, so the Famine indirectly destroyed traditional communities by destroying communal modes of production and inheritance. In the Caribbean, ecosystem collapse was an inevitable result of the dephysicalisation of the landscape. The comprehensive propertisation of Caribbean landscapes demanded the dissolution of Amerindian property and the dehumanisation of enslaved African peoples to ensure the rift between man and nature was maintained.

Marx’s regard for the ‘conscious and sustainable regulation of the metabolic interaction between humanity and nature’⁷⁰ reflects an understanding of the inherent logic of the landscape. Marx rejected linear approaches to agriculture’s development, enabling him to recognise modern agriculture’s irrational and destructive use of land.⁷¹ In situating alienation within its natural and social context, Marx demonstrated the costs of propertisation of the landscape. He resisted ahistoric and aspatial approaches to land, recognised the human, social and ecological costs of alienation not addressed today, and the fissuring of the landscape (through the division of its socio-cultural and ecological elements) as the critical event facilitating land’s ultimate abstraction or propertisation—its final conceptualisation as a bundle of transferable rights or property.⁷²