The protection camp at Thacker Pass, Peehee mu’huh, has been in place for more than four months.
This episode is an update starting with a new recording from May 18th, as well as audio from recent video updates recorded on-site by Max Wilbert over the past month or so.
This is part 4 of a series that originally appeared on ClimateandCapitalism. You can read part 1,part 2 and part 3.
Featured image: Processing cod in a 16th Century Newfoundland ‘Fishing Room’
THE FISHING REVOLUTION
Centuries before the industrial revolution, the first factories transformed seafood production
Marxist historians have been debating the origin of capitalism since the 1940s. It is true, as Eric Hobsbawm once commented, that “nobody has seriously maintained that capitalism prevailed before the 16th century, or that feudalism prevailed after the late 18th,”[1] but despite years of vigorous discussion in many excellent books and articles, there is still no consensus on when, where and how the new system formed and became dominant.[2]
This article does not try to resolve the debate or propose a new grand narrative. My goal, rather, is to draw attention to an important aspect of early capitalism that has been almost entirely ignored by all of the participants: the development and growth of intensive fishing in the North Sea and northwestern Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
‘An immense fishing enterprise’
As we will see, transatlantic fishing in the 1500s was one of the world’s first capitalist industries. But even if that were not true, recent research into its size and scope demonstrates its extraordinary importance to the economic history of that period.
Part Two of this article discussed the work of Selma Barkham, whose archival research documented the previously unknown large-scale Basque whaling operations in the Strait of Belle Isle.
Similarly, Laurier Turgeon of Laval University has shown that the transatlantic cod fishing industry was much larger than previously thought. His work, based on archival records in French port cities, documents “an immense fishing enterprise that has been largely overlooked in the maritime history of the North Atlantic.” In the second half of the sixteenth century, “the French Newfoundland vessels represented one of the largest fleets in the Atlantic. These 500 or so ships had a combined loading capacity of some 40,000 tons burden [56,000 cubic meters], and they mobilized 12,000 fishermen-sailors each year.”
To those must be added annual crossings by some 200 Spanish, Portuguese and English ships.
“The Newfoundland fleet surpassed by far the prestigious Spanish fleet that trafficked with the Americas, which had only half the loading capacity and half as many crew members…. The Gulf of the Saint Lawrence represented a site of European activity fully comparable to the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. Far from being a marginal space visited by a few isolated fishermen, Newfoundland was one of the first great Atlantic routes and one of the first territories colonized in North America.”[3]
Historian Peter E. Pope reaches a similar conclusion in his award-winning study of early English settlements in Newfoundland:
“By the later sixteenth century, European commercial activity in Atlantic Canada exceeded, in volume and value, European trade with the Gulf of Mexico, which is usually treated as the American center of gravity of early transatlantic commerce … The early modern fishery at Newfoundland was an enormous industry for its time, and even for our own.[4]
In the same period, close to 1,000 ships sailed annually to the North Sea from Holland, Zeeland and Flanders. The Netherlands-based fishing industry was so important that Philip II used part of his American gold and silver to finance warships that protected the Dutch herring fleet from attacks by French and Scottish privateers.
In the 1400s, the Dutch fleet in the North Sea caught and processed huge volumes of fish, making herring the most-widely consumed fish in northern Europe. In the 1500s, the North Sea herring catch remained stable while the Newfoundland fishery transformed the market — in 1580, Newfoundland fishers brought back 200,000 tonnes of cod, more than double the North Sea herring catch in its best year. By the end of the century, cod had replaced herring as the most important commodity fish in Europe, by a large margin. This graph shows the growth of herring and cod sold in continental Europe from 1400 to 1750.
Old and New World supplies (tonnes) of herring and cod to European market. (Source: Holm et al, “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution ca. AD 1500” Quaternary Research, 2018)
It is clear that in the 1500s intensive fishing became a major industry, an important component of the revolutionary social and economic changes then underway across Europe.
The first capitalist factories
In 1776, in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously attributed the “greatest improvements in the productive powers of labor” to “the effects of the division of labor,” in what he called manufactories. In some pin-making establishments, for example, “about eighteen distinct operations … are all performed by distinct hands,” By dividing up the tasks, pin factories produced many times more pins than would have been possible if each worker made them individually.[5]
Less famous, perhaps, is the particular emphasis that Karl Marx placed on the importance of division of labor in manufacture, his term for “combining together different handicrafts under the command of a single capitalist” [6] before the introduction of machinery in the industrial revolution. “The division of labor in the workshop, as practiced by manufacture, is an entirely specific creation of the capitalist mode of production.”[7]
A recent book claims that production by division of labor was invented in the 1470s, on Portuguese sugar plantations on the island of Madeira. The assignment of different activities to different groups of slaves shows, the authors say, that “the plantation was the original factory.”[8]
While that was an important development, it was not the first case of factory food production. Over half a century earlier, as we saw in Part One, Dutch merchants, shipbuilders, and fishworkers introduced a sophisticated division of labor to produce food in much greater volume — not a luxury product like sugar, but a mass commodity, seafood. The large, broad-bottomed herring busses, in which teams of workers captured, processed and preserved fish in the North Sea, have a strong claim to being the first capitalist factories.
French fishers used similar vessels, called bankers or bank ships, on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks in the 1500s. Laurier Turgeon describes a typical division of labor in “the precursor of our factory ships,” as the cod were hooked and hauled up:
“All eviscerating or dressing operations were carried out on deck where activity had turned well and truly into assembly-line production. The ship’s boys grabbed the fish [from one of the fishers] and threw it onto the splitting-table. The ‘header’ severed the head, gutted it, and in the very same movement, pushed it towards the ‘splitter’ at the opposite end of the table. Two or three deft strokes of the knife sufficed to remove the backbone, after which the ‘dressed’ filet dropped down the hatch into the ship’s hold. There, the salter laid it out between two thick layers of salt.”
Work continued apace from dawn to dark, even overnight when the catch was particularly good. Every bank ship was “a workshop for the preparation and curing of fish” and the workers’ activity “resembled 19th-century factory labor in many respects.”[9]
The inland cod fishery also involved an assembly-line division of labor, in facilities built each year on Newfoundland’s stony beaches. A journal kept by ship’s surgeon James Yonge in the 1600s, summarized here by historian Peter Pope, describes the factory-like operation of Newfoundland fishing stations, called fishing rooms by English fishworkers.
“If fishing was good, the crews would head for their fishing rooms in late afternoon, each boat with as many as one thousand or twelve hundred fish, weighing altogether several tonnes. … The shore crews began the task of making fish right on the stage head, the combination wharf and processing plant where the fish was unloaded. A boy would lay the fish on a table for the header, who gutted and then decapitated the fish…. The cod livers were set aside and dumped into a train vat, where the oil rendered in the sun. The header pushed the gutted fish across the table to the splitter, who opened the fish and removed the spine…. Untrained boys moved the split fish in handbarrows and piled it up for an initial wet-salting. This salting required experience and judgment, as Yonge stressed: ‘A salter is a skillful officer, for too much salt burns the fish and makes it break, and wet, too little makes it redshanks, that is, look red when dried, and so is not merchantable.’ …
“After a few days in salt, the shore crews would rinse the fish in seawater and pile it on a platform of beach stones, called a horse, for a day or two before spreading it out to dry on a cobble beach or on flakes, rough wooden platforms covered with fir boughs or birch bark….. At night and in wet weather, the fish being processed had to be turned skin side up or collected in protected heaps. After four or five days of good weather, it was ready to be stored in carefully layered larger piles containing about fifteen hundred fish.”[10]
On long beaches, there could be multiple fishing rooms with workers from many ships in close proximity. As Pope writes, “This sophisticated division of labor, the large size of the production unit, together with the time discipline imposed by a limited fishing season gave the dry fishery some of the qualities of later manufacturing industries.”[11]
The sixteenth century fishing rooms and bank ships were factories, long before the industrial revolution.
‘A distinctly capitalist institution’
In Capital, Marx argues that merchant activity as such — buying cheap in one place and selling dear in another — did not undermine the feudal mode of production, nor did craftsmen who made and sold their own products. It was the integration of manufacture and trade that laid the basis for a new social order: “the production and circulation of commodities are the general prerequisites of the capitalist mode of production.”[12] The actual transition to capitalism, he wrote, occurred in three ways: some merchants shifted into manufacturing; some merchants contracted with multiple independent craftsmen; and some craftsmen expanded their operations to produce for the market themselves.[13]
But, as Maurice Dobb comments in Studies in the Development of Capitalism, the problem with schematic transition schemas, including Marx’s, is that the actual process was “a complex of various strands, and the pace and nature of the development differ widely in different countries.”[14]
For example, Selma Barkham found that Basque whaling expeditions to Labrador were organized and financed by what she calls money-men: “men with a solid financial background, and a good deal of experience, both in money-raising and in the insurance industry.”[15]
In England, on the other hand, as Gillian Cell shows, the Newfoundland fishery was “run by men of limited capital … [It] was primarily the preserve of the west-countrymen,” not London’s merchant grandees, and certainly not money-men. The largest capital expense, the ship itself, was typically shared among several investors. “Most commonly a ship would be divided into thirty-two parts, any number of which might be owned by the same merchant, but on occasion there might be as many as sixty-four.” In other cases, investors reduced their cost and risk by leasing ships, with no payment due until they returned.[16]
The investors hired a captain who hired the sailors and fishers, and contracted with a victualler who provided fishing gear, boats, barrels, salt, and other essentials, including food and drink for a long voyage. One person might play multiple roles — the captain and victualler might also be investors, for example.
A capitalist enterprise requires capital; it also requires workers. The very existence of intensive fishing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shows that there were thousands of men and boys in England and western Europe whose livelihood depended on working in the distant fishing factories.
It was arduous and dangerous work that took them away from home for most of the year. Just travelling to and from the fishing grounds took a month or more each way, in crowded wooden ships that might sink at any time. Maritime historian Samuel Elliot Morrison described the sixteenth century Newfoundland fishery as “a graveyard of ships” — more merchant ships were lost at sea in the years 1530-1600 than in all of World War II.[17]
And yet captains apparently had no difficulty in recruiting full crews of skilled and unskilled workers every year.
Little research has been done on the social origins of these workers, but it is surely significant that the rapid expansion of long-distance fishing in England in the 1500s coincided with a wave of rural enclosures and consolidation, in which “the traditional peasant community was undermined as layers of better-off peasants became wealthy yeoman farmers, some entering the ranks of the gentry, while others were pauperized and proletarianized — and on a massive scale.”[18] In the long sixteenth century (roughly 1450 to 1640), “great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”[19]
In the Netherlands in the mid-1500s, about five percent of the male population worked in the herring industry.[20] There, and in England, France and Spain, a growing number of men who had formerly supplemented their diet and income with occasional fishing now had to work for others — having lost their land, they turned to the sea full time. Some may still have owned small plots of land and others probably worked as agricultural laborers between voyages, but all were part of a new maritime working class whose labor enriched a rising class of merchant-industrialists.
As we saw in Part One, workers on Dutch herring busses were often paid fixed wages. That was rare on English and French ships: usually, the gross proceeds from selling the catch were divided in three — one-third for the investors, one-third for the victualler, and one-third for the captain and crew. The captain took the largest part of the crew’s share, while workers received different amounts depending on their skill and experience, with laborers and boys receiving the least. Share payment reduced the investors’ losses when the catch was small or lost. It was also a form of labor discipline: as an English merchant wrote, because the fisherworkers’ income depended on the size of the catch, there was “lesse feare of negligence on their part.”[21]
From a purely legal standpoint, the merchants, shipowners, victuallers and fishworkers on each expedition were part of a joint venture, but as Daniel Vickers writes, that formality did not change the fundamental class relationship.
“Relations between merchants and their men remained in substance those of capital and labor. Merchants still garnered the lion’s share of the profits (and bore most of the losses); they retained complete ownership of the vessel, provisions, and gear throughout the voyage; and they could do with their capital what they wished once the fish had been sold. By early modern standards of economic organization, this transatlantic fishery was a distinctively capitalist institution.”[22]
Ecological Impact
Beginning in the early 1600s, a few English mariners sailed an additional 900 miles or so from Newfoundland to the area now known as New England. All were astonished by the abundance of fish — and especially by their size.
John Brereton, 1602: “Fish, namely Cods, which as we encline more unto the South, are more large and vendible for England and France than the Newland fish.”
James Rosier, 1605: Compared to Newfoundland cod, New England cod were “so much greater, better fed, and abundant with traine [oil]” and “all were generally very great, some they measured to be five foot long, and three foot about.”
Robert Davies, 1607: “Hear wee fysht three howers & tooke near to hundred of Codes very great & large fyshe bigger & larger fyshe then that which coms from the bancke of the new Foundland.”[23]
Newfoundland and New England cod are separated by geography, but they are the same species. The difference in size and abundance wasn’t caused by genetics, but by a century of intensive fishing. Marine biologist Callum Roberts explains:
“By the time of these voyages, Newfoundland cod had been intensively exploited for a hundred years, and fishing there had evidently already had an impact on fish numbers and size. Catching fish reduces their average life span. Since fish like cod continue growing throughout their life span, fishing therefore reduces the average size of individuals in a population. The Newfoundland fishery had driven down the average size of cod, and the relatively unexploited stocks in New England became a reminder of the past.”[24]
A recent study estimates that until the late 1800s the annual catch was less than 10% of the total cod population[25], far below the level deemed sustainable in the twentieth century. That, together with the fact that the catch increased, year after year, seems to imply that in the early modern fishing had little or no impact, but that is misleading, because the total cod population was composed of distinct local populations. Since fishing operations tended to stay in areas where fish congregated, local cod populations could be, and were, diminished by intensive fishing.
By 1600, for example, in the area known as the English shore, “fishers made, on average, only about 60 percent of the catch per boat that they had come to expect.”[26] The total catch remained high because some fishers worked harder, using more boats or staying at sea longer, while others shifted geographically, targeting less depleted populations as far away as the aptly named Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
“As human fishing removed larger, more mature fish from each substock, the chances of abrupt swings in the reproductive rate increased. In short, even at the seemingly ‘moderate’ levels of the 1600s and 1700s, fishing altered the age (and perhaps gender) structures, size, weight, and spawning and feeding habits, and the overall size of codfish stocks in the North Atlantic.”[27]
Cod are among the most prolific vertebrates on earth. Mature females release 3 to 9 million eggs a year: someone once calculated that if they all grew to maturity, in three years it would be possible to walk across the ocean in their backs. In reality, only a few hatch and few of those avoided being eaten as larvae, but under normal conditions (i.e. before intensive fishing) enough survived to maintain a stable population in the trillions. Intensive fishing disrupted that metabolic and reproductive cycle, but the total number of cod was so great that it took nearly five centuries for the world’s largest fishery to collapse.
A Fishing Revolution
In 2018, a team of environmental historians led by Poul Holm proposed that the birth and rapid growth of intensive fishing in Newfoundland should be called the Fish Revolution. A careful study of the fishery’s size, its impact on European markets and diets, and its environmental effects led them to conclude that historians “have grossly underestimated the historical economic significance of the fish trade, which may have been equal to the much more famed rush to exploit the silver mines of the Incas.” The Fish Revolution was “a major event in the history of resource extraction and consumption. … [that] permanently changed human and animal life in the North Atlantic region.”
“The wider seafood market was transformed in the process, and the marine expansion of humans across the North Atlantic was conditioned by significant climatic and environmental parameters. The Fish Revolution is one of the clearest early examples of how humans can affect marine life on our planet and of how marine life can in return influence and become, in essence, a part of a globalizing human world.”[28]
That conclusion synthesizes a large body of recent research. It is, I think, absolutely correct as far as it goes, but it needs to be supported a deeper understanding of the social and economic drivers of change. In brief, the Fish Revolution was caused by a Fishing Revolution.
The success of the North Sea and Newfoundland fisheries depended on merchants who had capital to invest in ships and other means of production, fishworkers who had to sell their labor power in order to live, and a production system based on a planned division of labor. It would not have been possible in the Middle Ages, because none of those elements existed. The long-distance fishing operations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were among the first examples, and very likely the largest examples, of what Marx called manufacture — “a specifically capitalist form of the process of social production.”[29]
In the Fishing Revolution, capital in pursuit of profit organized human labor to turn living creatures into an immense accumulation of commodities. From 1600 on, up to 250,000 metric tonnes of cod a year were caught, processed, and preserved in Newfoundland and transported across the ocean for sale. That increased production supported a qualitative increase in the volume of fish consumed in Europe — and it began the long-term depletion of ocean life that in our time has pushed cod and many other ocean species to the brink of extinction.
+ + + + + +
Many questions remain. How did the huge increase in fish from Newfoundland affect coastal and regional fisheries in Europe? Who were the workers who joined long distance fishing fleets? Did the same men return year after year, or was it a temporary expedient for some? How did the merchants who financed the expeditions invest their profits? We know that merchants who invested in American colonies tended to support Parliament when Civil War broke out in England the 1640s, but what about the West Country capitalists who organized transatlantic fishing? How were North Atlantic ecosystems affected by the large-scale removal of top predators?
More research is needed, but the existence of a large fishing industry during what Marx called the age of manufacture is beyond doubt. Despite that, historians debating the origin of capitalism have rarely mentioned the industry that employed more working people than any field other than farming. I hope this article contributes to a more rounded picture, and shows that no account of capitalism’s origins is complete if it omits the development and growth of intensive fishing in the centuries when capitalism was born.
This four-part article on intensive fishing and the birth of capitalism is part of my continuing project on metabolic rifts. Your constructive comments, suggestions, and corrections will help me get it right. -IA
Notes
[1] Eric Hobsbawm, “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (Verso, 1978), 162.
[2] Since the 1980s, the two leading schools of thought have been Political Marxism, associated with Robert Brenner, and World-systems Analysis, associated with Immanuel Wallerstein. For recent work from those currents, see: Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post, eds., Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019); and Christopher K. Chase-Dunn and Salvatore J. Babones, eds., Routledge Handbook of World-systems Analysis (Routledge, 2012).
Important books that critique and move beyond both approaches include: Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism (Pluto, 2011); Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket, 2012); and Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule (Pluto 2015).
[3] Laurier Turgeon, “Codfish, Consumption, and Colonization: The Creation of the French Atlantic World During the Sixteenth Century,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Caroline A. Williams (Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2016) 37-38.
[4] Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) 13, 22.
[5] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library, 2000) 3-5.
[6] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 456-7.
[20] James D. Tracy, “Herring Wars: The Habsburg Netherlands and the Struggle for Control of the North Sea, ca. 1520-1560,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2 (Summer 1993) 254
[21] Sir David Kirke in 1639, quoted in Pope, Fish Into Wine, 161.
[22] Daniel Vickers, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 89-90.
[23] Brereton, Rosier, and Davies quoted in Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Island Press, 2007) 37-38.
[24] Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Island Press, 2007), 38.
[25] G. A. Rose, “Reconciling Overfishing and Climate Change with Stock Dynamics of Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) over 500 Years,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (September 2004), 1553-1557.
[26] Peter Pope, “Early estimates: Assessment of catches in the Newfoundland cod fishery, 1660-1690,” quoted in John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (University of California Press, 2005), 567.
[27] John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (University of California Press, 2005), 569.
[28] Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research, 2019, 1-15.
This is part 3 of a series that originally appeared on Climate and Capitalism. You can read part 1 and part 2. Featured image: The Spanish Armada off the English Coast, by Cornelis Claesz. van Wieringen, ca. 1620
THE FIRST COD WAR
How England’s government-licensed pirates stole the Newfoundland fishery from Europe’s largest feudal empire
In 1575, a moderately successful Bristol merchant named Anthony Parkhurst purchased a mid-sized ship and began organizing annual cod fishing expeditions to Newfoundland. Unlike most of his peers, he travelled with the fishworkers; while they were catching and drying cod, he explored “the harbors, creekes and havens and also the land, much more than ever any Englishman hath done.” In 1578, he estimated that about 350 European ships were active in the Newfoundland cod fishery — 150 French, 100 Spanish, 50 Portuguese, and 30 to 50 English — as well as 20 to 30 Basque whalers.[1]
In fact, there were many more ships in the Newfoundland fisheries than that — sailing close to shore, Parkhurst apparently did not see the several hundred French ships that worked on the Grand Banks every year. Nevertheless, as historian Laurier Turgeon writes, his figures allow a comparison to the more famous treasure fleets that sailed from the Caribbean to Spain in the same period.
“Even if one accepts Parkhurst’s simplistic figures, the Newfoundland fleet — comprising between 350 and 380 vessels crewed by 8,000-10,000 men — could have more than matched Spain’s transatlantic commerce with the Americas, which relied on 100 ships at most and 4,000-5,000 men in the 1570s — its best years in the sixteenth century.…
“However approximate, these figures demonstrate that the Gulf of St. Lawrence was a pole of attraction for Europeans on a par with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Far from being a fringe area worked by only a few fishermen, the northern part of the Americas was one of the great seafaring routes and one of the most profitable European business destinations in the New World.”[2]
Despite the profits others made, Parkhurst found that “the English are not there in such numbers as other countries.” A decade earlier, he would have found far fewer. And yet, by 1600 the number of English ships that travelled annually to the Newfoundland fishery had more than tripled, while Spanish ships had all but disappeared. To understand how and why that happened, we must take a brief detour into European geopolitics.
England versus Spain
John Cabot had claimed the new land for England in 1497, but the government didn’t follow up, and few English merchants and fishers were interested. England’s internal market for fish was well served by cod from Iceland and herring from the North Sea, and the wealthy London merchants who dominated England’s foreign trade were conservative and resistant to change. As John Smith later wrote of English merchants’ reluctance to invest in American colonies where fishing was the major industry, they chose not to risk their wealth on “a mean and a base commoditie” and the “contemptible trade in fish.”[3]
The few English expeditions to Newfoundland before 1570 were organized by smaller merchants and shipowners who were not part of the London merchant elite: they sailed not from London or even Bristol, but from smaller ports in the West Country, the southwestern “toe” of England.
As a result, English ships in Newfoundland were substantially outnumbered by ships from continental Europe for most of the 1500s. This reflected the imbalance of power in Europe, where England was a minor country on the periphery, while Spain controlled an immense empire. After Spain annexed Portugal in 1581, the total capacity of its merchant ships was close to 300,000 tons, compared to England’s 42,000. Spain claimed, and could enforce, exclusive access to “all the areas outside Europe which seemed at the time to offer any possibility of outside trading.”[4]
But England’s economy was expanding, and a growing number of English entrepreneurs and adventurers sought to break Spain’s economic power, especially its domination of transatlantic trade. Between 1570 and 1577, for example, at least thirteen English expeditions challenged Spain’s monopoly by trading slaves and other commodities in the Caribbean.[5] Throughout Elizabeth I’s reign (1558–1603) the organizers and supporters of such ventures lobbied hard for what Marxist historian A.L. Morton called “a constant if unformulated principle of English foreign policy — that the most dangerous commercial rival should also be the main political enemy.”[6]
Economic rivalry was reinforced by religious conflict. England was officially Protestant, while Spain was not only Catholic, but home to the feared and hated Inquisition. When a Protestant-led rebellion against Spanish rule in the Netherlands broke out in 1566, Dutch refugees were welcomed in England, English supporters raised money to buy arms for the rebels, and wealthy English Calvinists organized companies of English soldiers to join the fight. Spanish officials, in return, actively supported efforts to overthrow Elizabeth and install a Catholic monarch. In 1570, Pope Pius V added to the conflict by excommunicating “the pretended Queen of England.” He ordered English Catholics not to obey Elizabeth, and declared that killing her would not be a sin.
Queen Elizabeth I
As the Marxist historian Christopher Hill wrote of conflicts in England in the next century, “whether we should describe the issues as religious or political or economic is an unanswerable question.”[7]
When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Spain was the richest and most powerful country in Europe, and England was too weak to challenge it directly. Instead, Elizabeth surreptitiously supported a maritime guerilla war against Spain’s merchant ships and colonies, a freelance war for profit conducted by government-licensed raiders who paid their own expenses and kept most of what they stole. Such legal pirates were later dubbed privateers — I will use that term to distinguish them from traditional pirates, although in practice it was difficult to tell them apart.
Piracy had been endemic in England for centuries, especially on the southern coast; the pirates “were skilled sailors, organized in groups, and often protected by such influential landowning families as the Killigrews of Cornwall . … the risks of piracy were fairly low, the profits large.”[8] Many of the mariners who signed on as privateers in Elizabeth’s time had been pirates before, and would return to piracy when their privateering licenses expired. The successful ones were feted at court, and the most successful received knighthoods. If they were captured by Spanish officials, they faced execution as common pirates, but in England privateering was a respectable profession, dominated by “west country families connected with the sea, for whom Protestantism, patriotism and plunder became virtually synonymous.”[9]
In theory, privateers were licensed under an ancient law that permitted merchants to recover goods stolen by foreign vessels, but that was usually a legal fiction.
“The promoter of a venture had merely to perform a routine which amounted to buying a license from the Lord Admiral through his court. Many did not even bother with this formality, but obtained a private note from the Lord Admiral direct, or even sailed without license altogether, strong in the conviction that any objectors could be bought off in the unlikely event of a day of reckoning.”[10]
Promoters, usually ship owners, financed privateering ventures by selling shares to investors, who ranged from rich merchants and government officials to local tradesmen and shopkeepers. Ten or fifteen percent of the loot went to the crown, and the remainder was split three ways, between investors, the promoter, and the captain and crew.
While men from all classes took part, most privateering voyages in Elizabeth’s time were organized and led by men who were outside of London’s merchant elite. Most came from the West Country, home territory not only for pirates but for most of the English fishing expeditions to Newfoundland. A common theme in contemporary discussions of fishing was its importance as a training ground for the navy, but it was also a training ground for piracy. Historian Kenneth Andrews has shown that English merchant ships often engaged in both trading and raiding on the same voyages[11] so it would be surprising if some of the seafarers who carried fishers to Newfoundland didn’t also attack merchant ships, if only in the off-season.
Perhaps the most successful Elizabethan privateer was one-time slave trader Sir Francis Drake. He is best-remembered for circumnavigating the globe, but he did that not for the thrill of discovery, but to evade capture after he looted Spanish treasure ships on the coast of Peru. The booty he brought back earned his backers, including the Queen, an astonishing 4600% profit on their investment.
In Part Two, I quoted Perry Anderson’s description of Spain’s 16th Century plunder of gold and silver in Central and South America as “the most spectacular single act in the primitive accumulation of European capital during the Renaissance.”[12] The English campaign of licensed piracy during Elizabeth’s reign can be called primitive accumulation once-removed — some great capitalist fortunes originated as pirate booty, stolen from the thieves who stole it from the Aztecs and Incas.
Open war between England and Spain broke out in 1585, when Elizabeth publicly declared support for the Dutch rebels and officially sent soldiers to aid them. When Spain’s King Philip II responded by prohibiting trade with England and seizing English merchant ships in Spanish ports, Elizabeth encouraged privateers to increase their attacks on Spanish shipping, and Philip began planning a direct attack on England.
On May 30 1588, a fleet of 130 ships carrying 19,000 soldiers set out from Lisbon to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth. Two months later, the Great Armada was in disarray, soundly defeated by a smaller English force. Only 67 Spanish ships and fewer than 10,000 men survived.
English propagandists attributed the victory to the grace of God and Francis Drake’s leadership, but it was mostly a result of incompetent Spanish leadership — if ever a naval venture deserved to be called a total screw-up from beginning to end, it was Spain’s 1588 Armada.[13] And although patriotic textbooks often describe England’s victory as a turning point in the war, Spain’s navy actually recovered quickly and inflicted an equally devastating defeat on Drake’s fleet in 1589. The war continued until 1604, when two new kings, James I of England and Phillip III of Spain, finally signed a peace treaty.
Some historians of the Anglo-Spanish war view it as an unreasonably protracted waste of effort, since neither side gained territory, and the final treaty essentially restored the status quo. That’s true if the war is viewed as a military fight to protect or expand territory, which for Spain’s feudal rulers it was. But for the merchants who were the primary promoters, financiers and often warriors on the English side, it was an economic war — if they had read von Clausewitz, they might have said that their war was business conducted by other means. They aimed to profit by capturing the enemy’s merchant ships, and by doing that on a large scale for 18 years, they broke Spain’s monopoly on Atlantic commerce.
“Seemingly an inconclusive, even at times half-hearted struggle, this war in fact marked a turning-point in the fortunes of both nations and above all in their oceanic fortunes. …
“Commerce-raiding, it is true, could not win the war…. Yet the cumulative impact of continual shipping losses upon the Iberian marine was heavy. English sources suggest that the English captured well over a thousand Spanish and Portuguese prizes during the war, losses which must have contributed as much as any other factor to the catastrophic decline of Iberian shipping noted in 1608 by a Spanish shipbuilding expert. The system of the transatlantic flotas [treasure fleets] was of course maintained. … But the rest of Iberian trade was perforce abandoned very largely to foreign shipping.”[14]
An important part of England’s economic war, disregarded by many historians, was a war for cod.
Targeting Newfoundland
For a decade before the war began, English officials had been discussing expulsion of Spain from the Newfoundland fishery as a possible strategic objective. The argument was strongly made in November 1577 by one of the Queen’s advisors, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in A Discourse How Hir Majestie May Annoy the King of Spayne.[15] (Obviously, “annoy” had a stronger meaning then!)
Humphrey Gilbert
The second son of a wealthy West Country landowner, Gilbert was a strong advocate of expansionist, pro-Protestant and anti-Spanish policies. His leadership of the brutal suppression of the Desmond Rebellion in Ireland in 1569 won him a knighthood from the Queen and the fully deserved label “Elizabethan terrorist” from a 20th century historian of colonial conquest.[16] In 1572, he led a force of 1,500 English volunteers against the Spanish army in the Netherlands.
His 1577 “Discourse” (today it would be called a memorandum or position paper) proposed a pre-emptive attack on Spanish and Portuguese (and possibly French) ships in Newfoundland — “eyther by open hostilytie, or by some colorable meanes; as by geving of lycence under lettres patentes to discover and inhabyte some strange place, with speciall proviso for their safetyes.” The latter course would allow the Queen to disavow attacks on foreign ships if necessary, and “pretend yt was done without your pryvitie.” [without your approval.]
Gilbert offered to personally finance, organize and lead a fleet to Newfoundland, to attack Spanish and Portuguese ships, seize their cargoes, and commandeer the best ships while burning others. This could be accomplished by a relatively small force, because the fishers worked from shore, leaving few if any men on the big ships, “so that there is as little doubt of the easye taking, and carrying of them away.” What’s more, the expedition would pay for itself, because Newfoundland fish “is a principal and rich and everie where vendible merchaundise.”
Such an attack would not only deprive Spanish merchants of ships and the “great revenues” they obtained from fishing, it would prevent Newfoundland cod from reaching Spain, causing “great famine.” Beyond that, Humphrey suggested that a permanent settlement in Newfoundland could be a base for attacking Spanish ports and shipping in the Caribbean.
There is no record of Elizabeth’s reaction to this plan, but six months later she issued Letters Patent to “our trustie and welbeloved servaunt Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” incorporating something very like the “colorable meanes” he had suggested. In exchange for 20% of any gold or silver he might find, the Queen gave Gilbert a six-year license “to discover, finde, search out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreys and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.” He would personally own all land within 200 leagues of any permanent settlements he established by 1583 — an immense area — and could “take and surprise by all maner of meanes whatsoever … as of goode and lawful prize” any ship that entered that area without his permission. [17]
The Letters Patent included a pro forma instruction not to attack ships from friendly nations, but in practice Gilbert now had a license to establish Newfoundland as England’s first overseas colony, expel foreign fishers, and use the island for privateering attacks.
He certainly tried, but as the Queen said, he was “a man noted of not good happ [luck] by sea.”[18]
His first voyage, in 1578, barely reached Ireland before desertions and storms forced him to turn back. That failure cost him most of his inheritance, and discouraged investors from supporting him again: it took four years to raise enough money for a second try.
In 1583, three of his five ships and most of his men were lost to sickness, mutiny, and shipwreck, but he did reach Newfoundland, where he held a formal ceremony attended by the merchants and masters of the 36 English, French, Spanish and Portuguese fishing ships then in St. John’s harbor. He declared the island an English possession, and announced that in future all fishers would have to pay rent to him and taxes to the Queen. All of which was moot, because he and his ship were lost in a storm on the way back to England.
Cod war
Gilbert failed to execute his plan, but the fact that it existed and was to some extent approved in royal Letters Patent, shows that the Newfoundland fishery’s strategic importance was recognized in England’s ruling circles. So it isn’t surprising that when open war broke out two years later, one of Elizabeth’s first actions was to order two privateer fleets to attack Spanish shipping — one in the Caribbean, and the other in Newfoundland. Bernard Drake (no relation to Francis) received the latter commission, “to proceed to Newfoundland to warn the English engaged in the fisheries there of the seizure of English ships in Spain, and to seize all ships in Newfoundland belonging to the king of Spain or any of his subjects, and to bring them into some of the western ports of England.”[19]
In July 1585, Drake left Plymouth with an investor-financed fleet of ten ships. After capturing a sugar-laden Portuguese ship on the way, the privateers travelled to St. John’s harbor, where they recruited several English fishing ships to join in attacking their Spanish competitors.[20]
As Gilbert had predicted, the well-armed privateers received little resistance from merchants’ fishing ships. In less than two months, they seized 16 or 17 ships in Newfoundland and took them to England with their cargoes of dried cod and over 600 prisoners — fishworkers who probably weren’t even aware that open war had started. Many of the prisoners died when several ships sank during the crossing, and most of the rest died of hunger or typhus in English jails, because Drake didn’t pay for food or care.
Bernard Drake’s Newfoundland expedition returned a 600% profit to the investors. He kept four of the most valuable ships, and in January 1586 he was knighted by the Queen. He died three months later in the same typhus epidemic that killed his prisoners.
The tide turns
The 1585 attack in Newfoundland cost Spanish investors not only a significant number of ships and skilled fishworkers, but most of that year’s fishing revenue. Those losses were multiplied over the next two years, when Philip II ordered all merchant ships to remain in their home ports so he could conscript the best of them for his planned attack on England. Less than half of the vessels that sailed in the 1588 Armada were purpose-built warships — the rest were merchant ships, carrying soldiers. Few of those made it back to Spain, and many that did required major repairs.
The loss of so many ships and a three-year hiatus in fishing revenue was a major setback for Spanish participation in the Newfoundland fishery. The number of ships travelling from the Iberian peninsula to Newfoundland dropped off radically in the following decade, and those that took the risk were under constant threat of privateer attacks. The surviving records are poor and incomplete, but we know for sure that there were 27 fishing ships among the prizes brought to English ports in just three years, from 1589 to 1591, and undoubtedly there were more. It wasn’t gold or sugar, and no one was knighted for stealing fish, but the cargo of a single fishing boat sold for up to five hundred pounds — a respectable return for owners, investors and crew.[21]
From the late 1590s on, ships from the Spanish empire were rarely seen in Newfoundland waters, while the number of English ships increased substantially. They were still outnumbered by French fishers, but there was little conflict, because the French mainly fished offshore, producing the wet pickled cod that was popular in Northern Europe, while the English mainly fished inshore and produced dried salt cod for southern Europe and Mediterranean markets.[22]
After the 1604 treaty was signed, the English merchants took a few years to adjust, but by 1612 English ships were carrying salt cod directly from Newfoundland to Bilbao, formerly a major center for Spanish cod shipping. “The tide had begun to turn. In the Newfoundland fisheries English and French interests had won out over Spanish and Portuguese ships by the early seventeenth century.”[23]
Part Four of this article will discuss the role of intensive fishery in capitalist development, and the environmental impact of early capitalist fishing.
This article is part of my continuing project on metabolic rifts. Your constructive comments, and corrections will help me get it right. —IA
[22] This wasn’t just a matter of consumer tastes. Wet cod did not keep well in the warmer climate of southern Europe, while dried salt cod kept indefinitely, even when transported by mule to inland cities in hot weather.
[23] Regina Grafe, Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650-1800 (Princeton University Press, 2012), 59.
Editor’s note: This essay reminds me of premise ten from Derrick Jensen’s book Endgame: “The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.”
According to The Parable of the Poisoned Well, there once lived a king who ruled over a great city. He was loved for his wisdom and feared for his power. At the heart of the city was a well, the waters of which were clean and pure and from where the king and all the inhabitants drank. But one evening an enemy entered the city and poisoned the well with a strange liquid. Henceforth, all who drank from it went mad.
All the people drank the water, but not the king, for he had been warned by a watchman who had observed the contamination. The people began to say, “The king is mad and has lost his reason. Look how strangely he behaves. We cannot be ruled by a madman, so he must be dethroned”.
The king sensed his subjects were preparing to rise against him and grew fearful of revolution. One evening he ordered a royal goblet to be filled from the well and drank from it deeply. The next day there was great rejoicing among the people, for their beloved king had finally regained his wisdom and sanity.
According to Fromm, we are inclined to see incidents of mental illness as individual and isolated disturbances, while acknowledging — with some discomfort, perhaps — that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture that is supposedly sane. Fromm haunts our self-image even today, attempting to unsettle these assumptions of sanity:
Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself.
In an age now widely described as the Anthropocene, the conventionally held distinction between sanity and insanity is at risk of collapsing … and taking our civilisation with it.
The line shifts over time
At least since Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), it has been understood that the idea of (in)sanity is an evolving, socially constructed category. Not only does the medical validity of mental health diagnoses and treatments shift with the times, but what has been judged “sane” in one era has the potential to blur into what is not in another — and without announcement.
This can disguise the fact that social practices or patterns of thought that may once have been considered healthy may now be properly diagnosed as unhealthy. And while this can apply to individual cases, there is no reason to think it should not also apply more broadly to a society at large. A society might go insane without being aware of its own degeneration.
One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise, with Foucault, that power shapes knowledge. If profits and economic growth are the benchmarks of success in a society, it simply may not be profitable to expose a society as insane, and even members of an insane society may sooner choose wilful blindness than look too deeply into the subconscious of their own culture.
How can we be so sure of our own sanity, asked psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, pictured in 1974. Wikimedia Commons
If our society is not sane — and I find myself pointing towards this thesis — another question follows: what might sanity look like in an insane world?
I come to these questions without mental health training or expertise, but simply as an ordinary member of late-stage capitalist society, one suffering in his own way and trying to understand the mental health burdens that accompany our ecocidal and grossly inequitable mode of civilisation. I make no comment on the very real biophysical causes for mental illness, such as chemical imbalances or physical injury.
Instead, I reflect, at a “macro” level, on the sanity or insanity of the dominant culture and political economy in contemporary capitalist societies such as Australia, asking how the world “out there” can impact the inner dimension of our lives.
Following Fromm’s lead, I inquire not so much into individual pathology, but into what he calls “collective neuroses” and “the pathology of normalcy”. Of course, collective neuroses are not easily observed, for they are, by nature, the background fabric of existence and so easily missed.
Drinking the Kool-Aid
At first, I tried to distil a positive life lesson from the Parable of the Poisoned Well, but I quickly realised this was the wrong way to approach it.
There is arguably no moral guidance in the fable, only an amoral social insight. If there is a lesson, it is that sometimes it is easier or safer simply to conform to common assumptions or practices, no matter how dubious or absurd they are, to avoid being socially ostracised. If you do not go with the flow you may be deemed mad, so it may be better just to blend in and drink the Kool-Aid.
A second reading of the parable points to the relativity of notions of sanity, again suggesting that what’s sane or insane isn’t fixed, but is culturally dependent: a person is sane if they “function” well enough in the society, even if that society is sick.
It is this relativity of sanity that Fromm calls into question in The Sane Society. “The fact that millions of people share the same vices,” he wrote, “does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
He felt that society needed certain objective conditions to be sane, including environmental sustainability. If too many of humankind’s most basic needs were not being met despite unprecedented capacity, he felt it would be proper to declare a society sick, even if the behaviour producing the sickness was widespread and validated by its own internal cultural logic.
What is “normal” behaviour today? The climate emergency points to our fatal addiction to fossil fuels. We know their combustion is killing the planet, but we can’t help ourselves. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 to advise us on the science of climate change, yet here we are, more than 30 years later, and carbon emissions continue to rise (excepting only the years of financial crisis or pandemic). We emit 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, in full knowledge of their impacts.
In 2019, fossil fuels supplied around 85 per cent of global primary energy demand. Driven by a fetish for economic growth, voters support politicians who bring lumps of coal into a parliament for a laugh and enthusiastically build new fossil fuel power stations. It is a tragedy disguised as a grim joke.
Scientists warn that current trajectories of climate heating are not compatible with civilisation as we know it, with potentially billions of lives at risk this century, both human and non-human. You know something is wrong when the Arctic is burning. And yet nothing is more “normal” than hopping into a fossil-fuelled car or consuming products shipped around the world to satisfy the carboniferous desires of affluent society.
We’re deforesting the planet and destroying topsoil to feed a population that is growing by over 200,000 people every day. The United Nations projects we’ll have reached almost ten billion people by mid-century.
This human dominance of the planet under global capitalism is contributing to a holocaust of biodiversity loss, with the World Wildlife Fund recently reporting that populations of vertebrate species have declined by 68 per cent since 1970. We are living through the sixth mass extinction, driven by human economic activity that is not just normal but encouraged, rewarded and widely admired.
Empire marches on like a snake eating its own tail, pursuing growth for growth’s sake — the ideology of a cancer cell.
For whom, then, do we destroy the planet? Is a greater abundance of “nice things” what we are lacking in the overdeveloped world? Or is there, as historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford once opined, an inner dimension to our crises that must be resolved before the outer crises can be effectively met?
Nice things that fail to meet our needs become trash, polluting the planet. Alexander Schimmeck/Unsplash, CC BY
How easy it is to live life regurgitating the prewritten script of advanced industrial society: cogs in a vast machine, easily replaced. Perhaps we see our disenchantment reflected in the eyes of those tired, alienated commuters, a class into which it is so easy to fall simply by virtue of being subjects of the capitalist order. We all know that there is more to life than this.
We find ourselves living in an age where the old dogmas of growth, material affluence and technology are increasingly exposed as false idols. Like a fleet of ships that has been unmoored in a storm, our species is drifting in dangerous seas without a clear sense of direction.
Where are the new sources of meaning and guidance that all societies need to fight off the ennui? Pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to refer to a condition in which a culture’s traditional norms have broken down without new norms arising that can give sense to a changing world. Perhaps this is the term that best explains our existential condition today.
I am reminded of a poem by Michael Leunig:
They took him on a stretcher
To the Home for the Appalled
Where he lay down in the corner
And be bawled and bawled and bawled.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he wailed,
When asked about his bawling,
‘It’s the world that needs attention;
It’s so utterly appalling.’
What is a sane reaction to an insane society?
One could go on, but it would be perverse to do so. “Doom porn” is not my business or purpose. But there is a case for diagnosing our society as insane — not as rhetorical strategy, but in the pursuit of literal truth.
If an individual knowingly destroyed the conditions of his or her own existence, we’d question their sanity. If a mother only fed her children if she could make a profit, we’d doubt the soundness of her mind. If a father took all the household wealth and left the rest of the family in destitution while building bombs in the basement that could destroy the neighbourhood, we’d call him psychopathic.
And yet these are characteristics of our society as a whole. Fromm would not permit us to diagnose ourselves and our society as sane just because the actions that produce the features outlined above are considered “normal”. There is a pathology to our normalcy — my own regrettably included — and this pathology is no less pathological just because it is shared by millions upon millions of people.
‘A sane person in an insane society must appear insane.’ Kurt Vonnegut. Shutterstock
There are negative mental health effects that might naturally and justifiably arise when otherwise sane people find themselves living in an insane world. The paradox that threatens to emerge has already been variously noted.
In Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut Jnr writes, “a sane person in an insane society must appear insane”. Thomas Stephen Szasz contends: “Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society”. And the British psychiatrist R. D. Laing said insanity was “a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. I think I recall Star Trek’s Dr Spock saying something similar.
How can we not get depressed when reading the newspapers today or watching our politicians go about their business with such confident incompetence? How can we not grieve the wildlife and natural habitat being destroyed each moment? What parent can look to the future and not feel a foreboding dread at what world their children and grandchildren will inherit?
At the same time, and because of that dread, it is hard to maintain the emotional resources to care for strangers or “join a movement” when stress, agitation, worry and busyness clutter our mental lives. This can make society seem like a harsh place, lacking in generosity of spirit or compassion.
Whether it’s from watching white supremacists march or listening to climate deniers speak from platforms in parliament and mass media, a nausea sets in, a sickness not so much of the mind but of the soul.
This is an existential diagnosis, not a medical or psychiatric one. It would be wrong to make peace with this madness. The world we live in should not be treated as normal, and it should not be a sign of good health to become “well adjusted” to a society that is casually practising ecocide, celebrating narcissism, institutionalising racism and assessing the value of all things according to the cold logic of profit maximisation.
It is okay not to feel okay
We must not assume behaviour that makes an individual “functional” within a sick society is sufficient evidence of their sanity. In such a society, it is okay not to feel okay, to cry and feel grief, to feel dread and alienation. In our tears, let us find solidarity, for we are not alone.
Remember this when you wake up prematurely in the morning with an anxiety without object, or as you stare at the ceiling late at night as you try to fall asleep. You are not losing your mind. It is precisely because you have a grip on reality that reality seems so out of whack.
On my third reading of the Parable of the Poisoned Well, I noticed something I had missed — it was the watchman, the man who warned the king not to drink the poisoned water the rest of the citizenry had already consumed.
Wanting to quash the revolutionary sentiment, the king succumbed to public pressure and eventually drank from the well in order to fit in. But what about the watchman? Is it possible he never drank the poisoned water and remained sane in an insane society? Did that made him seem mad?
Perhaps my thoughts here are those of a watchman, someone who has tried not to drink the Kool-Aid, who has attempted to resist the pathology of normalcy.
Admittedly, I have questioned my own sanity at times — when, for example, I’ve found myself dancing in the middle of a busy intersection with Extinction Rebellion, risking arrest. What had driven me to act in a way that sees me surrounded by police with batons, guns and pepper spray? They sure looked mad.
Call me crazy, but I’ll finish with the words often attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”.
Editor’s note: Asking questions, questions that emerge from your empathy if you care for life on the planet, and questions that emerge from your confusion if you see that so many things are going so badly wrong, is a very important, crucial step. We completely agree with the last paragraph of this article and our answer is DGR’s Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy.
We do not know how to stop the planetary destruction caused by capital — but by asking the right questions we can find our way forward together.
We live in a failed system. It is becoming clearer every day that the present organization of society is a disaster, that capitalism is unable to secure an acceptable way of living. The COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural phenomenon but the result of the social destruction of biodiversity and other pandemics are likely to follow. The global warming that is a threat to both human and many forms of non-human life is the result of the capitalist destruction of established equilibria. The acceptance of money as the dominant measure of social value forces a large part of the world’s population to live in miserable and precarious conditions.
The destruction caused by capitalism is accelerating. Growing inequality, a rise in racist violence, the spread of fascism, increasing tensions between states and the accumulation of power by police and military. Moreover, the survival of capitalism is built on an ever-expanding debt that is doomed to collapse at some point.
The situation is urgent, we humans are now faced with the real possibility of our own extinction.
How do we get out of here? The traditional answer of those who are conscious of the scale of social problems: through the state. Political thinkers and politicians from Hegel to Keynes and Roosevelt and now Biden have seen the state as a counterweight to the destruction wreaked by the economic system. States will solve the problem of global warming; states will end the destruction of biodiversity; states will alleviate the enormous hardship and poverty resulting from the present crisis. Just vote for the right leaders and everything will be all right. And if you are very worried about what is happening, just vote for more radical leaders — Sanders or Corbyn or Die Linke or Podemos or Evo Morales or Maduro or López Obrador — and things will be fine.
The problem with this argument is that experience tells us that it does not work. Left-wing leaders have never fulfilled their promises, have never brought about the changes that they said they would. In Latin America, the left-wing politicians who came to power in the so-called Pink Wave at the start of this century, have been closely associated with extractivism and other forms of destructive development. TheTren Maya which is Mexican president López Obrador’s favorite project in Mexico at the moment is just the latest example of this. Left-wing parties and politicians may be able to bring about minor changes, but they have done nothing at all to break the destructive dynamic of capital.
THE STATE IS NOT THE ANSWER
But it is not just experience that tells us that the state is not the counterweight to capital that some make it out to be. Theoretical reflection tells us the same thing. The state, which appears to be separate from capital, is actually generated by capital and depends on capital for its existence. The state is not a capitalist and its workers do not on the whole generate the income it needs for its existence. That income comes from the exploitation of workers by capital, so that the state actually depends on that exploitation, that is, on the accumulation of capital, to reproduce its own existence.
The state is obliged, by its very form, to promote the accumulation of capital. Capital, too, depends on the existence of an instance — the state — that does not act like a capitalist and that appears to be quite separate from capital, to secure its own reproduction. The state appears to be the center of power, but in fact power lies with the owners of capital, that is, with those persons who dedicate their existence to the expansion of capital. In other words, the state is not a counterweight to capital: it is part of the same uncontrollable dynamic of destruction.
The fact that the state is bound to capital means that it excludes us. State democracy is a process of exclusion that says: “Come and vote every four or five years, then go home and accept what we decide.” The state is the existence of a body of full-time officials who assume the responsibility of ensuring the welfare of society — in a way compatible with the reproduction of capital, of course. By assuming that responsibility, they take it away from us. But, whatever their intentions, they are unable to fulfill the responsibility, because they do not have the countervailing power that they appear to have: what they do and how they do it is shaped by the need to ensure the reproduction of capital.
Just now, for example, politicians are talking of the need for a radical change in political direction as the world emerges from the pandemic, but at no point does any politician or government official suggest that part of that change in direction must be the abolition of a system based on the pursuit of profit.
If the state is not the answer to ending capitalist destruction, then it follows that channeling our concerns into political parties cannot be the answer either, since parties are organizations that aim to bring about change through the state. Attempts to bring about radical change through parties and the taking of state power have generally ended in the creation of authoritarian regimes at least as bad as those they fought to change.
ASKING WE WALK
So, if the state is not the answer, where do we go? How do we get out of here? We come to a conference like this, of course, to discuss anarchist answers. But there are at least three problems: firstly, there are not the millions of people here that we need for a real change of direction; secondly, we have no answers; and thirdly, the label “anarchist” probably does not help.
Why are there not millions of people here? There is certainly a widespread growing feeling of anger, desperation and an awareness that the system is not working. But why is this anger channeled either towards left-reformist parties and candidates (Die Linke, Sanders, Corbyn, Tsipras) or to the far right, and not towards efforts that push against-and-beyond the system? There are many explanations, but one that seems important to me is Leonidas Oikonomakis’ comment on the election of Syriza in Greece in 2015 that, even after years of very militant anti-statist protest against austerity, it still seemed to people that the state was the “only game in town.”
When we think of global warming, of stopping violence against women, of controlling the pandemic, of resolving our economic desperation in the present crisis, it is still hard not to think that the state is where the answers lie, even when we know that it is not.
Perhaps we have to give up the idea of answers. We have no answers. It cannot be a question of opposing anarchist answers to state answers. The state gives answers, wrong answers. We have questions, urgent questions, new questions because this situation of impending extinction has never existed before. How can we stop the destructive dynamic of capital? The only answer that we have is that we do not know.
It is important to say that we do not know, for two reasons. Firstly because it happens to be true. We do not know how we can bring the present catastrophe to an end. We have ideas, but we really do not know. And secondly, because a politics of questions is very different from a politics of answers. If we have the answers, it is our duty to explain them to others. That is what the state does, that is what vanguardist parties do. If we have questions but no answers, then we must discuss them together to try and find ways forward. “Preguntando caminamos,” as the Zapatistas say: “Asking we walk.”
The process of asking and listening is not the way to a different society, it is already the creation of a different society. The asking-listening is already a mutual recognizing of our distinct dignities. We ask-and-listen to you because we recognize your dignity. This is the opposite of state politics. The state talks. It pretends to ask-and-listen but it does not and cannot because its existence depends on reproducing a form of social organization based on the command of money.
Our asking-listening is an anti-identitarian movement. We recognize your dignity not because you are an anarchist or a communist, or German or Austrian or Mexican or Irish, or because you are a woman or Black or Indigenous. Labels are very dangerous — even if they are “nice” labels — because they create identitarian distinctions. To say “we are anarchists” is self-contradictory because it reproduces the identitarian logic of the state: we are anarchists, you are not; we are German, you are not. If we are against the state, then we against its logic, against its grammar.
A MOVEMENT OF SELF-DETERMINATION
We have no answers, but our walking-asking does not start from zero. It is part of a long history of walking-asking. Just in these days we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune and the centenary of the Kronstadt Uprising. In the present, we have the experience of the Zapatistas to inspire us, just as they are preparing their journey across the Atlantic to connect with the walkers-askers against capital in Europe this summer. And of course we look to the deeply ingrained practice of councilism in the Kurdish movement in the terribly difficult conditions of their struggle. And beyond that, the millions of cracks in which people are trying to organize on an anti-hierarchical, mutually recognitive basis.
It is simply not true that the state is the only game in town. We must shout from the rooftops that there is another, long-established game: the game of doing things ourselves, collectively.
Organization in the communal or council tradition is not on the basis of selection-and-exclusion but on the basis of a coming-together of those who are there, whether in the village or the neighborhood or the factory, with all their differences, their squabbles, their madnesses, their meannesses, their shared interests and common concerns.
The organization is not instrumental: it is not designed as the best way of reaching a goal, for it is itself its own goal. It does not have a defined membership since its aim is to draw in, not to exclude. Its discussions are not aimed at defining the correct line, but at articulating and accommodating differences, at constructing here and now the mutual recognition that is negated by capitalism.
This does not mean a suppression of debate, but, on the contrary, a constant process of discussion and critique aimed not at eliminating or denouncing or labeling the opponent but at maintaining the creative tension that arises from holding together ideas that push in slightly different directions. An always difficult mutual recognizing of dignities that pull in different directions.
The council or commune is a movement of self-determination: through asking-listening-thinking we shall decide how we want the world to be, not by following the blind dictates of money and profit. And, perhaps more and more important, it is an assumption of our responsibility for shaping the future of human life.
If we reach the point of extinction, it will be of no help to say on the last day: “It is all the fault of the capitalists and their states.” No. It will be our fault if we do not break the power of money and take back from the state our responsibility for the future of human life.
John Holloway is a professor of sociology in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. His books include Change the World without Taking Power (Pluto Press, London, 2002, 2019) and Crack Capitalism(Pluto Press, London, 2010).
Dr. Matt Landos, co-author of the report, says that many people erroneously believe that fish declines are caused only by overfishing. “In fact, the entire aquatic food web has been seriously compromised, with fewer and fewer fish at the top, losses of invertebrates in the sediments and water column, less healthy marine algae, coral, and other habitats, as well as a proliferation of bacteria and toxic algal blooms. Chemical pollution, along with climate change itself a pollution consequence, are the chief reasons for these losses.”
Aquatic Pollutants in Oceans and Fisheries documents the numerous ways in which chemicals compromise reproduction, development, and immune systems among aquatic and marine organisms. It warns that the impacts scientists have identified are only likely to grow in the coming years and will be exacerbated by a changing climate.
As co-author Dr. Mariann Lloyd-Smith points out, the production and use of chemicals have grown exponentially over the past couple of decades. “Many chemicals persist in the environment, making environments more toxic over time. If we do not address this problem, we will face permanent damage to the marine and aquatic environments that have nourished humans and every other life form since the beginning of time.”
The report identifies six key findings:
Overfishing is not the sole cause of fishery declines. Poorly managed fisheries and catchments have wrought destruction on water quality and critical nursery habitat as well as the reduction and removal of aquatic food resources. Exposures to environmental pollutants are adversely impacting fertility, behavior, and resilience, and negatively influencing the recruitment and survival capacity of aquatic species. There will never be sustainable fisheries until all factors contributing to fishery declines are addressed.
Chemical pollutants have been impacting oceanic and aquatic food webs for decades and the impacts are worsening. The scientific literature documents man-made pollution in aquatic ecosystems since the 1970s. Estimates indicate up to 80% of marine chemical pollution originates on land and the situation is worsening. Point source management of pollutants has failed to protect aquatic ecosystems from diffuse sources everywhere. Aquaculture is also reaching limits due to pollutant impacts with intensification already driving deterioration in some areas, and contaminants in aquaculture feeds affecting fish health.
Pollutants including industrial chemicals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, plastics and microplastics have deleterious impacts to aquatic ecosystems at all trophic levels from plankton to whales. Endocrine disrupting chemicals, which are biologically active at extremely low concentrations, pose a particular long-term threat to fisheries. Persistent pollutants such as mercury, brominated compounds, and plastics biomagnify in the aquatic food web and ultimately reach humans.
Aquatic ecosystems that sustain fisheries are undergoing fundamental shifts as a result of climate change. Oceans are warming and becoming more acidic with increasing carbon dioxide deposition. Melting sea ice, glaciers and permafrost are increasing sea levels and altering ocean currents, salinity and oxygen levels. Increases in both de-oxygenated ‘dead zones’ and coastal algal blooms are being observed. Furthermore, climate change is re-mobilizing historical contaminants from their ‘polar sinks.’
Climate change and chronic exposures to pesticides all can amplify the impacts of pollution by increasing exposures, toxicity and bioaccumulation of pollutants in the food web. Methyl mercury and PCBs are among the most prevalent and toxic contaminants in the marine food web.
We are at the precipice of disaster, but have an opportunity for recovery. Progress requires fundamental shifts in industry, economy and governance, the cessation of deep-sea mining and other destructive industries, and environmentally sound chemical management, and true circular economies. Re-generative approaches to agriculture and aquaculture are urgently required to lower carbon, stop further pollution, and begin the restoration process.
