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all, to be an aspect of nature, is to be in a world of relations among multiple phe-
nomena. And this, Marx suggests, is the source of our joy as human beings, our
particular
species being
. Elsewhere Marx writes: 'The labor-process . . . is the neces-
sary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the
everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is indepen-
dent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such
phase' (Marx, 1967, p. 184). One has to read only a little more of Marx to pick
up on the innuendo that the labour process within capitalism has indeed become a
demeaned and diminished thing: 'the less he is attracted by the nature of the
work . . . the more close his attention is forced to be'.
But how does this take a political turn? There is a qualitative distinction between
what nature forces people to do, in a generic sense, and what workers are com-
pelled to do under capitalism. 'Nature does not invent capitalists on the one side
and workers on the other...' Marx moves back and forth, as thinker of specifi c
historical situations, on the one hand, and of universals, on the other hand, to
make a point. Workers, even under capitalism, are doing a
kind
of thing (nature
imposed) they would be doing anyway. Yet under capitalism, this compulsion is
mediated by capitalists, who compel workers to sell their labour power
as the
primary vehicle through which to engage with nature
. (Marx would not consider
the consumption of nature through visits to parks, scenic overlooks, or drives
through the countryside as engagements with nature, in his fully blown, relational
sense of the word.) One might say that Marx means to point to an inversion
whereby the capitalist assumes the role of nature. Where nature would impose a
real necessity; capital interlopes, imposing a false one - nature does not create
capitalists on one side and workers on another. Under capitalist social relations,
workers experience what nature would impose as something capitalists impose
instead, in a bastardised, constricted way.
But what is so wrong with the mediation of social relations? Indeed mediation
is not really the problem. (The problem is capitalist social relations.) Here we have
to go back to the idea that in transforming nature we transform ourselves, and back
to the potentially positive valence this has for Marx. 'In the labor-process . . . man's
(sic.) activity, with the help of the instruments of labor, effects an alteration,
designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. The process disap-
pears in the product; the latter is use-value, Nature's materials adapted by a change
of form to the wants of man. Labor has incorporated itself with its subject:
the
former is materialised, the latter transformed
' (Marx, 1967, p. 180, emphasis
added). The materialisation of labor is none other than the manner in which we
make ourselves in new ways, whilst at the same time remaking portions of the world
in new ways. And this is not somehow a process outside nature: it is one aspect of
nature acting upon (incorporating itself into) another, producing in the end a quite
different nature than was there before: there is nothing unnatural about New York
City.
Does Harvey mean there is nothing problematic about New York City? Not at
all. Under capitalism the labour process is the mechanism whereby capitalists
control what workers do (in nature) and assume the products of labour (trans-
formed nature) as their own. At the same time the waste products are often placed
outside the economy as so-called externalities for society and the state to deal with
(Katz, 2001). And all this, for Harvey, is what New York City expresses. There is
nothing 'unnatural' about this, it is simply (!) what nature becomes in its capitalist
