To the glory of those before.

We bask in the light of dying suns. We came into our own immortal youth so that the previous Gods could learn the precarity and preciousness of life, so that they could coo and simper over new deities: dangerous, momentary and outrageous powers screaming change into the world. The height of their ecstatic youth, their eternal glory, was their giving way, so that we could be born and one day depose them. 

They learned what life was, the day we were born: a prayer, a song to mortality. The urge is strong, in those fading stars, to hold on to the lingering dreams of youth. For a desire for safety, for a normalcy that they discovered in their own flourishing, they are willing to arrest change, to halt development and cancel everything: Abolish death! End Life! Stop Time! The worst atrocities are caused in the name of holding on. Fascisms calls for a return to a glorious past, it wants to hold on to what was lost, but no return is possible. Eventually empires crumble.

How beautiful it is that we are all born an orgasm. It is a kindness of the universe that power must yield through pleasure. Each king, each dictatorship exists, ultimately, so that they can safely give themselves away in their bedchamber. All this bloodshed, all this fear spread, so that a few (men) can feel safe enough to love. All this security, in order to be vulnerable. Even at its worst, tyranny exists to hand over the seeds of beauty. It’s a terrible, and unnecessary price to pay, but it can never win, in the long run. No dynasty survives. Eventually the prince and princess arise, eventually the people revolt, and with them come the wind and songs of change to blow down the doors, to topple the pyramids and cover them with sand. The tyrants are mortal and as long as men die, liberty will never perish. 

So to give the seeds of life, every dictator must kneel. And if life starts with submission, it ends there too. Our task, perhaps, is to midwife each other through, to help each other to breathe, to let it pass, to scream and to let go, in time. Finally, we will let go of life, one way or the other. Death is coming, as it were.

All our most beautiful moments are letting go. From a certain point of view, life is a struggle between constipation and release. We were born when our mothers let a part of themselves go. It must be one of the greatest deaths that can occur (before The Big One). They breathed, and contracted, and gave way, and here you are. Dad released himself into mum, mum released herself into the world, and you were released from whatever it was that you were before. 

The umbilical cord is cut and the acid in your bloodstream rises as the oxygen concentration falls and carbon dioxide builds. This is a new sensation. We were just pushed out into the world, and now, we find, we have to take in. So despite our protests, we breathe in. It’s painful, it’s hideous, but our lungs expand and air fills us and suddenly that anxious feeling decreases. Then it comes that we have to breathe out. Breathing in calms our anxiety, breathing out relaxes our effort. Breathing comes with pain, we scream – this is the origin of song – but it also relieves pain. We sing our pain and thus transform it into something beautiful. Baby screams, mum and dad and midwife cry, and grandma nods sagely. Life is pain, but you can sing.

We’ll spend the rest of our life breathing in and out, our heart beating, our organs churning. Eventually we have to learn control, continence. We become potty trained, and realise that fun can be improved if we can decide when to poop and when to hold on. We learn to control our hunger, to eat and drink following our needs, but not to always demand immediate satisfaction. We grow up. Bit by bit we can learn rhythms of all sorts, everything in its moment. That sleeping and eating and drinking can be had at different times, that fun can be had through timing. And so we learn life as a sort of symphony.  Life is music.

Musical discipline requires skill and patience, and so with all things. Study the ways of the world, the instruments of creation, and you can learn how to cause a clock to tick, a cat to purr, a bell to ring, a plant to climb, a maiden to moan. Each turns to its own rhythm, as the moon phases to its own tempo, as the earth around the stars, as the music of the spheres. Learn your own pace, march to your own beat, but synchronise, tune into the music you wish to play, and you can play with others, and communicate. No one can feel what you feel unless you sing it for them. In this way we cast spells Music is connection. Together connected we can harmonise. We learn to play with others, to improvise and coalesce and fight and squabble and share and tease and toy and win and lose and share again. Life is a jam session.

Between the orgasm of emergence and the orgasm of dissipation, it is given to all of us to shine a radiant light onto the world, to choose songs to sing and music to express. We are, each of us, Gods. It does not matter if we find God inside or outside of us, or if we cannot find God anywhere at all. It only matters what you wish to be a God of. What light do you wish to shine? What music does your heart wish to sing?

Jordan Peterson talks about Chaos and Order, and says that we should side with Order. He fears change, he fears the ‘feminine’ chaos and the world it evokes. This makes him a priest of constipation, a priest of holding on. But the opposite is not to be a priest of diarrhoea or incontinence. You want to be able to hold on when you need to, and let go when you have to. As Alan Watts says, we can have fun in playing for either side, just never hope that one of them wins. The fun is in the playing. If Order wins, then life is lost and you can never shit. If Chaos wins, then life is lost and you can never stop shitting. Life is a particularly bizarre and fascinating game of tidying up and messing things around, of holding on and letting go. Order without chaos is anxiety, unctuous righteousness. There’s no play, there’s no breathing space, there’s no dancing, there’s no love. Chaos without order is… brown and runny. A mess. A sandy expanse of nothingness. We want the sky to be more or less the sky and the sea to be more or less the sea, and the sea to meet the sand and the waves to break over them. We want to dive into the sea and to walk along the shore, gathering pretty stones and shells, making collections to celebrate one or other aspect of this glimmering universe. We don’t want to shit ourselves every time we go for a swim or take a walk. Neither chaos nor order must prevail. The show must go on.

I look to the matriarchs I’ve known. The empires they’ve ruled, the courts they’ve presided over, the palaces built. I was given to a garden that I could play in, with a climbing wisteria to dangle from, with fuchsia and jasmine and yew and almond, a little pond to fall into occasionally. There are yuccas in the window, and windchimes. My mother, her mother before her, their grandmothers, sought to build little idyls, gentle spaces of nurturance where new gods could play and grow and come into their powers. The gardens we build are made in the images of the lights we reflect. They were goddesses of Play, singing in the name of Love and Nurturance. They sought to raise princes who could depose the patriarchs. And so, in their own way, did the patriarchs, I suspect. Despite these empires of safety, the violence is never worth the result, and everyone knows it. So many of us build mazes of safety in the secret hope that someone will come and eventually lead us out of them. 

If you find yourself in a maze, remember to sing, so that someone can find you, and help lead you out. If you find yourself tripping and lose grip on reality, remember to sing (the breathing helps, as does the music). If you find yourself lost on a mountain, remember to sing to keep your spirits up. Life is pain, but you can sing. And if life is ending, if light is fading, remember to sing. Sing a song to a morning, a song to the light, a song to the darkness, and a song in the twilight. We sing to the glory of dying suns. Praise your predecessors so that they can go gently into that good night, and when it comes your time to fade away, sing a song to the new gods, sing your song into the night, and then let go.

Notes from A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, part 2: Sugar and early Plantations

The Castillian and Portuguese aristocracy, in debt with Italian financiers for help in their conquest of the Iberian peninsula, doubled down on their successful style of conquest, plunder and tribute and initiated the first colonial conquests of the Atlantic in the Canary Islands and Madeira. Madeira, the Island of Wood, was first known to the Portuguese in 1419. Initial deforestation followed as the Portuguese cut the great forests for shipbuilding lumber. The land was then turned to wheat growing for Portugal from the 1430s. Then the land was turned to sugar, and near total deforestation followed for fuel in the production process.

Sugar is difficult to process. Initial European production in Iberia (Valencia) funded by German banks used Muslim techniques developed in the near East, using slave and free workers. Commercial sugar production started in 1420s, and was taken to Madeira. by 1460s there was almost exclusively sugar production in Madeira. This developed all the tendencies of monoculture and led to the development of specialised labour and technology. In São Tomé, the Portuguese colony off the coast of West Africa, large scale slave plantations were developed, and the techniques invented here were later taken to the new world. "Centuries before Adam Smith could marvel at the division of labor across a supply chain that made a pin, the relationship between humans, plants, and capital had forged the core ideas of modern manufacturing - in cane fields. The plantation was the original factory."pp16 Demand from Europe was essentially infinite, and new expeditions to develop cane industry was financed by Italian and Flemish 'capitalists'.

Who worked these fields? In Madeira "Indigenous Peoples of the Canary Islands, North African slaves and - in some cases- paid plantation laborers from maniland Europe." pp16
The slaves were used to carve enormous irrigation channels across the islands. Sugar requires 50x its weight in wood for fuel to boil for the production process, and this led to the total deforestation of the island by 1530, leading to a crash in the island's sugar production, which increased the move to the New World for sugar production, taking its drive for deforestation with it. "Europe's wealthy ate the sugar, and sugar ate the island."pp17. The economy on Madeira then became a slave port (which role it functioned in until the 18th century) with land turned to vinyards. Wine production did not demand slave labour, but it did demand wood for the barrels - again this was brought from the New World.

Patel and Moore then begin a conversation about frontiers and how Capitalism works that I will return to later. They discuss how Capitalism is constantly using frontiers, boundaries, to filter communities/ecologies of life cycles and exchange, and consume them. To my mind they describe Capitalism as essentially a giant paper mill, mulching the entirety of the world's ecology and all life within it to pulp for profit: I am also reminded of the comment somewhere that the role of states is to make nature/people/resources 'readable', or processible, in the same way as a bar code at the supermarket. [There is a left-brain process at work here - see The Master and his Emissary]. Frontiers are necessary for Capitalism (see Eleanor Meiksins Wood on this as well) because they are where the complex web of life is transformed into the readable - the currency - the dollar. Frontiers are where the analogue becomes digital.

"we mean by cheapness: it's a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism's crises. Cheap is not the same as low cost - though that's a part of it. Cheap is a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kinds of work - human and animal, botanical and geological - with as little compensation as possible. We use cheap to talk about the process through which capitalism transmutes these undenominated relationships of life-making into circuits of production and consumption, in which these relations come to have as low a price as possible." pp22

Notes from A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Part 1

A history of the world in seven cheap things, a guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the future of the Planet. Patel R, Moore JW. Verso 2018.

Moore and Patel argue that talking about the Antropocene suggests that the current situation of ecological destruction is simply a result of human nature, and thus immutable; deplorable, but unavoidable. They suggest the term Capitalocene, to denote that the way that in modern history since circa the 1400s the development of the Capitalist system is a fundamentally different development to those climatic events that occurred before, even if they were also driven by human activity. The Capitalocene draws attention to Capitalism not just as an economic system but also as a way of "organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature."pp3

They frame their argument around the cheapening of "...seven cheap things: "Nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives...cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life. "Things" become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print."pp3 This pays attention to the way that the process of Capitalist accumulation requires the drawing of boundaries, the creating of terms such as "things" and "cheap". They give the example of Chicken as a starting point. Chickens are nature commodified, a genetically manipulated bird whose very lifespan no longer serves life in nature, but is accelerated and turned monstrous through fattening in order to serve the human appetite for cheap flesh. They then follow the chicken through the production line, showing the undervalued (and sometimes prison slavery) work that processes chicken for our maws, drawing attention to the injuries sustained by the workers. Their continued employment then rests on the free care provided by families and communities, and they explore the way that this is produced. Etc. We will go through the chapters separately eventually.

Their history begins with the medieval warm period of 950-1250, a climatic anomaly with a steady warm climate and mild winters. This had led to the tripling of the European population to 70million over five centuries. Agricultural surplus led to the formation of towns, and 20% of the population worked outside agriculture by 1300. They note also that increasing populations allowed for expansionary projects for Christendom - the Crusades and the reconquest of Spain. Crusaders would conquer land and demand tribute, [presumably setting up the basis of cash economies which allowed for financialisation]. The other aspect of conquest was that of cultivation. By the 1300s agriculture took up a third of all European land use and had expanded through deforestation.

Enter the Great Famine of 1315-1322 which they take as ringing the deathknell for Feudalism. Feudalistic power relations meant that the land was controlled by Lords and worked by peasants. During the previous centuries, agricultural surpluses had seen population expanding with carrying capactiy, and reducing returns on the profitability of land along with gradual soil degeneration. Lords wanted cash crops or grain that could be easily stored, in order to increase their profits. This tends towards monocultures and the control of the lords means the peasantry is unable to adapt what they grow to changing climate. This creates fragile food systems. [In the background to this is the whole process of enclosure of the commons, and the attack on women, for which more in Federici]. Then, when devastating rains started in 1315 (possibly due to the eruption of a volcano in New Zealand) what followed was seven years of famine and a reduction of the European population by 20%.

This was one among many famines leading to malnutrition, weakening peasant immune systems. Urbanisation is increasing as peasants are driven from the land (by lords or because of hunger). Enter the plagues of that era, with the Black Death arriving in 1347, and the European population further decreases to something like half of its pre 1300s level.

"The aristocracy wanted a relatively high peasant population, to maintain its bargaining position: many peasants competing for land was better than many lords competing for peasants. But with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn't just transmit disease - they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasant revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized - they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism's logic of power, production, and nature...The Black Death precipitated an unbearable strain on a system already stretched to the breaking point. Europe after the plague was a place of unrelenting class war".

Peasants demanded more freedom, restoration of rights, revocation of duties. The aristocracy responded with repression, legislating to keep labour cheap and attempts at reenserfment (which failed). Class struggle had the advantage and through multiple and enormous insurrections wages and living conditions improved for peasants and urban workers. In the rubble of the feudal system the ruling classes searched for new solutions.

Enter colonialism, in part 2.