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givens,' Smith writes (p. 23). The growing presence of the human being and the
expansion of the capitalist world creates a world in which a putative non-human
nature simply has no place apart from humans and their traces, while a universal
nature that would seamlessly blend human with non-human does not account well
for the manner of relationship among nature's parts (humans included). What do
these ideas mean? On the one hand, the so-called natural world and its processes
and laws now occur within a fi eld that has been altered by human activity, from
traces of industrial chemicals in biota globally to anthropogenic climate change.
Such examples, in addition to more mundane ones like fl ying planes or driving cars,
indicate that a human presence is afoot producing new admixtures (socionatures,
as some call them) of so-called nature: producing entities never produced before
with the aegis of natural 'laws' and with material substances that are of but not
reducible to 'nature'. It is not possible, when we explore such examples, to pry apart
the operations of 'natural' laws from the logics of instrumental, scientifi c reason.
Put another way, Marx renders humans a constitutive part of nature rather than a
passive part subject to transcendental laws (Braun, 2006, pp. 195-96).
On the other hand, the idea of an external nature is supplanted by the notion of
externalising
processes. Recall that for Marx humans beings, in order to be human,
must engage with the material world around them, a world they are ontologically
part of but that will not support them without intervention and reconstruction. In
practical terms human beings make objects that refl ect their needs and desires,
objects that refl ect who these human subjects are, and again allow them to become
who they are. We become human
through
our objects. (Every object is a subject for
another object, wrote Marx.) The fruit of our labour embodies potentially the best
of who we are and can be, while not exhausting our potential for further growth
and transformation. So, thought Marx, in the best of all worlds this is a joyful,
creative, collective endeavor; in the worst, shear drudgery, repetition, and alien-
ation. Under capitalism the process of externalisation is indeed problematic, as those
who produce value (commodities) are enjoined to produce (using means of produc-
tion they do not own) a surplus, which must be forked over to a class other than
themselves. Direct producers in other words produce an 'external' nature - they
externalise themselves, as one part of nature producing another - which then
becomes the property of another, thus rendering the nature they have produced a
very poor refl ection indeed of what they might become.
And here Smith reminds us of an important consequence of the notion that
human beings are part of nature: the changing nature of human beings themselves.
Over time, labour within capitalism involves what Marx called formal and real
subsumption. In the fi rst case, and speaking historically, labour is not too much
changed by capitalist work. The way to get producers to produce more is to work
them longer and harder, while not changing the work itself too much. This simple
fact of working for capital is what Marx called formal subsumption. But production
soon reaches its limit by way of this strategy. Once workers worked hard and longer,
more products can only come by fi nding more workers. The only option left is to
change the work itself: develop new technologies, new scientifi c know-how, new
materials, new machinery, through which workers - now with new 'skills' - might
produce more in the same amount of time as before and with the same amount of
effort. Thus is born the real subsumption of labour. In the fi rst volume of
Capital
Marx devotes several long and rich chapters to these processes. The result is that
labourers become instruments of machinery rather than the reverse. Their very
