Sage Against the Machine
This article was featured in the Autumn 2020 edition of Rupture. Purchase the latest edition of Rupture here
The Covid-19 lockdown has allowed many of us to have a slower pace in life, giving us a chance to notice the ‘joys of nature’. We’re also gardening more. A lot more. We’ve all seen the social media posts showing lengthy queues outside DIY shops like Woodies and B&Q.
Partly this is because many of us probably won’t be leaving the country this summer, and maybe also due to worries over food shortages. But, I think it’s actually deeper than that. Spending time outside, digging in the dirt and creating new life, feels good. It makes us happy.
Gardens & Greens Galore
The Seed Co-Op in the UK reported that orders were up to 6 times larger than during April last year. The demand was so exceptional, they were forced to reduce online sales to open for only 2 hours on a Sunday evening. In Scotland seed bomb sellers Kabloom reported sales were 10 times higher from the end of March to the start of May 2020. In America the national statistics for time spent gardening and doing DIY projects went up by 147%.
People aren’t just working on their own green spaces, they’ve also had more time and appreciation for nature overall. Sure we weren’t allowed to go anywhere but our local parks and green spaces for weeks. We couldn’t help but notice the trees budding, bees buzzing, birds building nests, and new ducklings swimming along. The foxes returned to their natural habitat, Dublin city centre. Meanwhile deer casually strolled down roads cleared of cars. With headline after headline describing the loss of this habitat or that species, is it any wonder that people have revelled in “nature is returning” stories?
Escaping the hustle and bustle
This isn’t just brought on by the pandemic though. The realities of living under capitalism (ridiculous housing prices, low wages, cost of childcare… the list is endless) has forced my generation to reconsider: what makes a happy life? Is it the crippling debt to have a perfect 2 or 3 bed house? Is it working 40-50 hours a week, then shopping in our free time?
We are so disconnected from nature in our day to day urban rush. You can’t notice the birds making their nests, watching them gather a bit of moss here and a twig there, if you’re running to catch the bus, running to work, running, running, running. Yet, even when we do manage to escape the hustle and bustle to find ourselves a bit of green space, how many of us spend that time dwelling on the anxieties caused by life under capitalism? We should not have to spend our lives running away from stress. You shouldn’t have to become some advanced nature enthusiast to appreciate the birds singing and the flowers dancing in the breeze.
Yet, regardless of how inconvenient capitalism makes it, and even though there are too few green spaces left in cities, still we flock to man-made parks where we practically have to sit on one another to get space on a sunny day.
Studies have shown a wide range of health benefits associated with spending time in nature. From reducing stress and anxiety to long term health benefits of less cancer and less disease, it’s clear nature is good for you.
Green spaces also provide us with a learning and restorative outlet which helps to give us a sense of purpose in life. And this is why I garden. For me it’s about having control over the work that I do, for what purpose I set myself a task and in what way do I carry it out. So accustomed are we to selling our labour power to fulfil tasks for some drab corporation, to make whatever product or to fulfill who-cares services, that we can forget how satisfying it is to have control over a piece of work, to be totally devoted to something because we are passionate about it, not because we need to get a pay cheque at the end of every month to survive.
Alienation and the Metabolic Rift
I have been working for almost 10 years now, rarely under my own initiative and direction. As Marx described in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, I’m alienated from the labour I do because I only “feel [myself] outside [my] work…[I] feel at home when [I’m] not working, and when [I’m] working [I] do not feel at home.” My labour is “not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.”
So it is with capitalist exploitation, you’re a cog in a machine working for someone else. Of course that’s soul crushing and alienating. So of course we seek outlets outside of work for fulfillment.
But, Marx also went further than that. He also talked about our separation from nature spurred on by capitalist development. The so-called ‘metabolic rift’ between nature and humans had both physical and mental consequences (see John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, published in 2000).
Capitalism forced people off the land and into factories. Notwithstanding the horrible conditions people suffered under feudal society, removing people from land meant we could no longer grow food and make clothing. We no longer had ‘nature’s toolbox’ at our disposal. We went from toiling and living off the land to surviving in packed cities, from a peasant to a worker who now has to rent their labour power to survive.
Once the land was cleared, industrial agricultural practices steadily increased, rapidly robbing the soil of its nutrients, replacing it with first imported fertilisers in the form of bird guano and crushed up bones, and now with artificial fertilisers. The once natural cycle of nutrients from land to human and back to land again - in other words, the human-nature metabolism - was disrupted. Under capitalism nature was ravaged on an enormous scale, with all the subsequent consequences we’re steadily reading about: deforestation, climate change, biodiversity loss, overfishing, and species extinction rates skyrocketing.
Our physical separation from nature then caused a change in ideas and attitudes about nature. Consider how we think of nature today. Typically we see it as something separate from ourselves, this ‘thing’ out there that we go and visit, and not as an essential part of our existence. Most talk of ‘saving nature’ or ‘saving the environment’ is couched in language that points to saving nature for its own sake (which I’m all for, don’t get me wrong), and not drawing on the fact that our very survival, our mental and physical health, are all inherently connected to it.
As Marx said, “Nature is man’s* inorganic body, that is to say, nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature . . . and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”
In other words, we need nature like we need our hands. You take care of your hands knowing how vital they are to your existence, your ability to secure happiness and health. Likewise nature should be a constant in our lives.
Have you ever come to the realisation, while out on a long walk or during a moment of relaxation while on holiday, that your job and your car don’t matter, that your family and friends and the experiences that you share together are what is most important? This is the head space we could always live in if capitalism was not interrupting our relationship with nature.
We can restructure our society so that we co-exist in a symbiotic relationship with nature instead of looting nature for all of its resources without a thought to its conservation. The pandemic, for all the disruption, all the loss to too many families, did bring a focus on the importance of nature in our lives. Our gardening is an expression of our alienation from work, our desire to sage against the machine and to build something better.
*’Man’ or ‘mankind’ was commonly used in Marx’s time. Today nearly half the global workforce is female, and we recognise and use language to acknowledge our non-gender conforming and trans siblings within the working class.