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bodies become attuned to and shaped by their labours; they make parts of things
according to a detailed division of labour, rather than whole things; they fi nd that
machines meant to save labour for capitalists do not save labour for them. Defying,
at least in part, O'Connor's notion that conditions of production preexist capitalist
production, the body's 'natures', ever pliable and moldable, change. Not, of course,
without incident and resistance.
6
The point of the production of nature idea is that it is not suffi cient to think of
nature as that which is non-human, nor suffi cient to say that nature includes the
human. Nature takes on particular forms over time and space; therefore, the spread
of capitalism over time and space involves a particular production(s) of nature(s)
under capitalism. But by production of nature does Smith just mean that nature is
controlled and dominated? Is the production of nature another way of saying capital
is masterful, knowing, controlling and determinant? I have already hinted at the
answer. It is that capitalistically produced nature shares important features of capi-
talism: where capitalism seeks to dominate and control the conditions under which
value and surplus value are to be produced and appropriated, it fi nds its domination
and control incomplete and fi ssured, with a host of unintended consequences and
contradictions in train. 'Just as capitalists never entirely control the production
process, its results, or the global capitalism it generates, so capitalist society does
not entirely control nature' (Smith, 2006, p. 25). There are strong parallels here
with O'Connor's thesis of a second contradiction of capitalism; and strong parallels
too with the ideas of Ted Benton, another prominent 'green' thinker concerned to
reconstruct the Marxist tradition. Benton (1996b) has long argued that Marx's idea
of the labour process was overly general: some labour processes utterly transform
the non-human natures they encounter, but others merely regulate or channel those
natures.
What Smith emphasises though is the further dialectical quality of the second
contradiction. Even though vast quantities of resources are vacuumed up by capital,
only for conditions of production to be threatened, nature becomes increasingly
capitalised - there is a large and growing trade in pollution credits, for example -
and
more elements
of nature are found for capital's circuits, from plant and animal
DNA to human body organs to seeds and water. Capitalism, or
particular sectors
of capital,
fi nds ways to make money on that which seems to pose an obstacle to
it.
7
As Benton (1996b) argues there is in fact no necessary 'second' contradiction at
all, or at least this may not be the best way to capture the capital-nature relation.
As David Harvey (1974) has noted there is nothing essential about any element
of non-human nature that makes it a resource. Something becomes a resource in
capitalist society as a factor of social, technological, and scientifi c change. What we
have learned in the meantime is that how to think of the physical properties, the
materiality as such, of these natural resources remains something of a mystery. They
are not determined by social/technological/scientifi c change and they are not unaf-
fected by it either. There is, as Noel Castree (2005) writes, a 'both/and' case to be
explored, a case that will simply look different as different natures come to matter
differently in different capitalist formations. Consider his work on the 'war against
the seals', which treats seals as agents within a tense network of actors - see
Box 17.3.
Unlike Altvater who is primarily attuned to the advantages fossil energy gave
industrial capitalism, and unlike Smith who is simply more interested
in the natures
that become
internal
to capital, Castree's seals, though nearly depleted, neither dis-
