Article

Life, Labor, and Value. Recreating Affective Food Ecologies Through Interspecies Cooperation

As our most complex and intimate relationship with wider environments, food and agriculture provide important opportunities for exploring affective ecologies. Here I re-visit some of the ways that Modern constructs of humans as radically different from environments and of value as a function of exchange work to produce agricultural systems that are ever less affective and more problematic. In an effort to construct value in a way more applicable to the whole of our biosphere, and not only to humans, I take up an explicitly non-Modern Heraclitean perspective which conceives of all life as essentially relational. I then extend Marx’s anthropocentric work to argue that all life labors to organize stocks and flows in environments which it finds useful and thus valuable. As co-adaptation illustrates, often produces value by finding usefulness in the by-products of other lives. Thus, we may understand ecological relationships as guided by the creation of abundance rather than the imposition of scarcity. From the Marxist tradition I then enlist the concepts of cooperation, which produces value synergistically, and exploitation which destroys the ability to create value, to suggest a basis for the evaluation of socio-natural trajectories, for creating more and less affective food ecologies.

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