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ABSTRACT

In this article, we argue that the physical structure of the front garden and its ecosystem is determined by an ensemble of diverse social and natural processes. The essential social form is that of visuality,- an abstract compositional force which provides conventions for assessing objects but also for reshaping their surface countenance and establishing their location within the garden.

Accordingly, the social processes of visuality are materially realised in the labour processes of gardening, while their consumption is mediated through the concrete process of gazing. The identified social processes include the prospect, aesthetic and panoptic dimensions of visuality. Labour conceives and creates them, while the physical structures and the natural processes reproduce and maintain them beyond the production time attributed to gardening. But they are increasingly undermined by the natural tendency of the plant ecosystem to grow. Consequently, the essential contradiction of the front garden is how the laws and tendencies of the plant ecosystem act as a countertendency to the social forms of visuality.

This paper shows that beneath the surface appearance, there exists complex relationships between nature and society in this space we call the suburban front garden.

Introduction

In the social sciences in general and in sociology in particular, gardening and gardens have been a neglected area of research. What does exist is rather eclectic and diverse body of specialized knowledge. Our major criticism of the sociology of the garden is that it has concentrated on discovering the essential social/cultural identity of this physical entity and the subsequent functions it ‘performs’ for the immediate residents of the suburban household and the surrounding neighbourhood. The consequence of this form of sociologism is that not only is nature left out and subsequently needs to be brought back in, but also that the actual diverse physical structures of the garden fail to get discussed. Therefore, the spatial aspect is eliminated from this type of sociological analysis. In order to retrieve the natural and the spatial, we need to investigate the internal dynamics of the garden itself and attempt to explicate the relationships between the social, the natural and the spatial within the physical confines of the front garden. Accordingly we propose that these three aspects of the garden should be seen as processes which can interact with each other to form the essential structure of the garden1. We also suggest that the determining process is the social, which establishes the form in which the other two processes operate under.

And this essential social form of the cultural/social is a process of visuality. The concept of visuality attempts to capture the complex nature of gazing, incorporating the subjective process of seeing and the concrete objects seen. Therefore, the process of visuality is a continuous dialectical relationship between seeing and the seen. And as the

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subjective process of seeing is of a constant factor in gazing, accordingly it is the visible structures of the seen objects which determine the specificity of the process of visuality. We have located three specific forms of visuality which are present within the physical confines of the front garden. They are the prospect, the panoptic and the aesthetic forms ofvisuality. All three of these concrete processes of visuality form the ‘inner’ unity of the general abstract process of visuality which dominates the natural and spatial processes of the front garden. However, the prospect form of visuality is a necessary precondition for the panoptic and aesthetic processes because it creates the physical conditions for ‘depth’ of vision, – an essential requirement for the other two processes of visuality to operate. But, even before a specific process of visuality can occur, it is necessary to have sufficient space to either see through or to see in. This is provided by the crucial spatial relationship between the suburban house and street thoroughfare, where the front garden acts as a buffer zone between these ‘worlds’. We, accordingly begin our analysis at the spatial level and where the garden functions as a buffer zone.

But before we begin, it is necessary to have a brief word on our theoretical process of exposition in which we have engaged with in this paper. As suggested from our above comments, our paper has a definite logical structure to it as we attempt to unfold how the aforementioned processes are linked to each other in complex ways. We follow a precise logical procedure of progressing from one level of analysis to another. This is so because the unfolding of the categories of analysis at one level establishes the form, and thereby the necessary precondition, in which the following structures of next level have to work with (2). Therefore, the spatial level locates the garden as a buffer zone and provides the physical precondition for the emergence of the prospect process. This in turn, leads into

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the physical and social form of the prospect, which is subsequently absorbed into the process of panoptic visuality. Consequently, our sequence of analysis follows this succession where we begin with the garden as a buffer zone and then continue on to explicate the essential structures of the prospect visuality and then the panoptic process. And as the panoptic appropriates the prospect visuality within its framework, it is a more complex process of visuality than the prospect one. Consequently, although these two types of visuality have crucial differences which distinguishes the complex from the simple for instance, they also possess common characteristics. One common element (or moment) in these processes is that they are essentially about structuring the garden in order to see through it. But the aesthetic form of visuality, although it appropriates the distanced span of the prospect process, is essentially about gazing into the garden, specifically at designed focal points, – flower beds, shrubs and tree plantings. In constructing the aesthetic visuality through various labour processes, the gardener is creating a spatial entity which is not just a medium or conduit for the prospect and panoptic gazes but also a focal point of attention in itself for gazing upon. Therefore, our analysis of the aesthetic follows on from the our explication of the determinants of the prospect and the panoptic forms of visuality, as the aesthetic visuality can only exist within the physical confining contours laid down by the dicta of the panoptic process. Having uncovered the essential determinants of the social form of the diverse processes of visuality, we reach a point in which we can begin to assess their impact on the natural process of the garden ecosystem.

The natural process of the garden plants and their natural laws of development and growth operate under the social forms provided by the processes of visuality. The gardening labour processes consequently modify the natural ecosystem according to the

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imposed social forms of visuality. At this point in our analysis we can locate how the garden natural ecosystem and its inherent natural tendency to grow and develop acts as a countertendency to the imposed societal countenance of plants and their idealised physical location in the garden as established by the social forms of visuality. Therefore, crucially the natural process of the plants form a metabolic relationship with the social processes of visuality within the front garden (3). And finally we examine how the contradictory tendencies of the aesthetic and panoptic forms of visuality can manifest themselves on the empirical level when the street passer-bys attempts to gaze into the front garden and are confronted by the dilemma of competing visual focal points as suggested by these social forms of visuality. A compromise is attained, where the potential long duration of the aesthetic gaze and the continuous attempt by the object of the panoptic gaze to avoid detection, the actual gaze which emerges ‘metabolizes’ itself into a mere fleeting glance.

The Empirical and Theoretical Limits to the Sociological Conceptualization of the Front Garden

Many sociologists see gardens as cultural objects which represent a wide range of meanings about ourselves (Bhatti 1999; Groening and Schneider 1999; Hoyles 1991; Weigert 1994). Throughout history gardens have presented opportunities for developing connections to nature (Wilson 1991), for expressing power relations and creating aesthetic representations of nature (Verdi 2004: 360). Domestic front gardens (and gardening within) have been presented as a haven and retreat from public life (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989), but, as others have pointed out, it is carried out in a semi-public space (Constantine 1981; Ravetz and

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Turkington 1995). The distinction between back and front gardens seems particularly relevant here, as they are subjected to different forces and produce different practices. ‘[R]esidents elaborately tend their front yards, while using backyards as utility areas’ (Grampp 1990: 182). Or, in the words of one of the respondents cited in Bhatti and Church’s study (2001) on gardens in the UK:

My garden is my retreat. The front garden, like the rest, is lawned and open plan:it is very plain. This is intentional … I do not want the front to provide any expectations of what the back is like. The public and private image kept separate! (p. 378).

In opposition to the idea of the front garden being just a private affair, it has also been conceptualised as a place designed for the consumption of others (Grampp 1990). A debate has emerged about aesthetic design features of the front garden. Chevalier (1998) and others contend that front gardens are meant for the private gaze of the owners: a view from the front window. Others assert that the front garden is for public consumption and shaped in a way which maximises its impact on passers-by (e.g. Fiske et al. 1987). In modernity, the most dominant trend in the conceptualization of the front garden is to see it as a signifier of social status: a public space to show off social standing and ‘taste’.

In contrast, some have argued that status-seeking through gardening has become an obsession among sociologists rather than a true reflection of what the gardeners themselves think they are doing (Oliver 1981: 191). In the same light of the status-seeking gardener, other sociologists have conceptualised the front garden as a space for facilitating

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neighbourliness which is invested with a moral value and expresses a commitment to the wider community (Chevalier 1998; Robbins and Sharp 2006; Sime 1993; Weigert 1994). If there is any common theme to these accounts, it is that they are essentially concerned with how front gardens as cultural objects help to construct an identity (individual and/or communal) for the domestic inhabitants who live behind these semi-public spaces.

However, the overemphasis of the social aspect of gardening in the above works has eliminated the possibility of seeing the front garden as a natural living entity. As a consequence, it has eclipsed the conceptual divide between socio-cultural practices and nature’s dynamics by collapsing the two into a single, amorphous notion. This reductionism has taken sociology in a misleading direction, – into the excesses of sociologism, according to Murphy:

Sociology has correctly emphasized the importance of the social. But there is a point beyond which the rightful place of the social becomes the exaggerated sense of the social, beyond which the enlightened focus on the social becomes a blindness to the relationship between the processes of nature and social action, beyond which sociology becomes sociologism. The assumed dualism between social action and the processes of nature, with sociology focusing solely on the social as independent variable, has mislead sociology into ignoring the dialectical relationship between the two (1995: 694).

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Sociologism, therefore, tends to exaggerate the autonomy of social processes and ignores the natural components of the garden environment. The garden, as conceptualised by a sociology characterised by sociologism, is merely represented as an aesthetic object, which performs many and often competing cultural functions for its producers (4).

But sociologism tends not only to elide the natural processes but also spatial aspects of the garden – front and back – where architectural structures and design features are crucial determinants in constructing its ‘shape’. To avoid the pitfalls of sociologism, we thus need to develop an analysis that combines the social with the natural and the spatial. We propose that the social processes which operate in this spatial entity are essentially visual in determination. And this visual tendency is captured in the concept of visuality. This general abstract process of visuality both shapes and reflects various gardening labour processes. As a consequence, gardening is about creating the material and spatial conditions in which the general abstract process of visuality operates (5). All of the levels mentioned – the social, the spatial and the natural – provide various moments for the process of visuality to reproduce itself. For example, a hedge can simultaneously be shaped to look pretty (social) and can act as a barrier of entry (spatial) while its physical structure remains a living plant (natural) We will now turn to the presentation and analysis of some empirical material that exemplifies the visual qualities of front gardens and their respective social processes.

Methodology and empirical findings

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To investigate the visuality of front gardens, we used a visual methodology and conducted a photographic survey of gardens in five areas of Dublin – Castleknock, Templeogue, Leixlip, Lucan, and Walkinstown – which were selected according to their socio-economic profile and level of affluence. Ten gardens were drawn from each of the areas.

After receiving permission from the residents, the fifty front gardens were photographed from different angles, yielding more than three hundred photos. They form the empirical basis for the analysis which follows. Ten in-depth interviews were also subsequently conducted.

By engaging in a content analysis of the photographs, we discovered trends in the shapes of the gardens surveyed that suggested differing social processes were operating in the garden. These were not always obvious to immediate observation and on the spot interpretation. By photographing and analysing the spatial orientation of the planting techniques and inorganic structures – their aspects and focal points (6), we were able to compare and contrast the spatial dimensions of the front gardens and uncover trends in their architectural features. For example, Figure 1 shows how the householder has unimpeded view of the street, yet is unable to see their neighbouring house entrance because of the high hedge and tree acting as a screen between the two front gardens.

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1: The ‘funnel’ effect

These spatial orientations were noted and their frequency was counted as we surveyed the photographs. In this way we discovered that 42 gardens (84%) had an uninterrupted view of the street while many had a screen-like structure between neighbouring gardens. Overall, our photographic survey threw up the following empirical and spatial trends:

• All gardens had definite boundaries between themselves and the street;
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• Front gardens were not used for domestic purposes by the householders, with the exception of car parking;
• Most gardens had low boundaries on the street-side and high boundaries between the neighbouring gardens, ‘screening’ them from their immediate neighbours;
• A majority of the houses had a screen or light curtain in their front windows and doors
• All gardens had a strong aesthetic dimension to them which included architectural features as well as natural plantings.In attempting to make sense of these empirical and spatial trends, we can detect a number of contradictions which manifest themselves in or through the spatial entity of the garden. The physical boundaries which surround the garden inhibit physical movement into the front garden, yet the aesthetic display encourages visual engagement. Therefore, privacy is not an issue with regard to the public seeing into the garden from the street-side, yet it is an issue with regard to one’s immediate neighbours as a screen tends to block the adjoining neighbours. While the public are allowed to view the garden they are hindered in seeing into the house itself by the presence of net curtains on the front windows and doors. To unravel the nature of these contradictions we thus need to investigate the essential structure of the front garden and those forces which determine that structure. And as front gardens are designed and constructed by human endeavours, in combination with the forces of nature inherent in natural ecosystems, their visual analysis helps to uncover some of the complex interactions between social and natural processes.

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The suburban front garden as ‘buffer’ zone

In his work, The Decline of Public Man, Richard Sennett distinguishes street and the home as two differing types of living spaces, the street is conceptualised as ‘outer life’ and the domestic house as ‘inner life’. As the street facilitates contact with the threatening ‘others’, this contact must be negotiated: so as a way of interacting with other people on the basis of their differences. The inner life, on the contrary, revolves around what is shared and belongs to the family. It offers order and clarity while the outer space of the city is ever changing, never completed and necessarily ambiguous. In spatial terms, the social process of inner life inhabits the physical confines of the domestic house.

Sennet’s distinction between inner and outer life also ties in with Ravetz and Turkington’s (1995) concept of the garden as ‘buffer zone’ between public and private sphere:

[…] privacy was combined with decorative enclosure and display. Smog- resistant pivet hedging could be trimmed with military precision, iron railings could be defensive but also ornamental. Low walls with railings or fences with hedges could shield the front of the house from both street and side neighbours, and a floral arrangement in the front garden could be enjoyed equally from within and without. […] The primary function of these (front gardens) was to mark the boundary and act as a ‘buffer zone’ between the private home and the public street (p.180).

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From our photographic survey, we discovered that, besides the parking of cars and the storage of garbage bins, front gardens are typically not utilised. Only eight of the fifty randomly selected gardens we surveyed appeared to be used in some way: toys or balls scattered on the lawn; basketball nets installed on the wall; a cosy spot for pets. In contrast, many gardens featured benches which were positioned as a decorative feature, and were used mainly for ornamental purposes – to be seen rather than to see from. This is confirmed in some of the interviews: ‘I am never out in the front’ and ‘the front garden is more of a parking space than a garden’. The front gardens surveyed thus do not fall into the category of ‘inner life’ as they are not really utilised by their owners. Neither do they aspire to being a space determined by the outer life of the street.

Many gardens in our survey had clearly defined, low boundaries between the garden and the public street which facilitated ‘gazing’, though some gardens in the exclusive suburbs of Castleknock and the middle-class suburbs of Templeogue featured high street boundaries. Overall, a reliance on boundaries to protect privacy did not appear to be very widespread and this was confirmed in interviews with some of the residents. Most respondents did not express concern for the privacy of their front garden. The reason for this probably lies in the character of the passer-bys. Because of the way housing estates in Dublin are constructed as ‘cul-de-sacs’, they effectively segregate the various socio- economic categories from each other. As a consequence, rarely do perfect strangers walk past a front garden. Mainly neighbours and other residents in the locality make up the population of passer-bys: they are of ‘the same kind’, known to each other, at least by sight. They do not produce ‘alterity’. For this reason, the front garden and the street represents a

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public space of a particular kind: one which does not require an exercise in civility, in Sennett terms, but activates a sense of neighbourliness rather than face to face interaction with total strangers.

Consequently, because of the presence of low street boundaries and the likelihood that the passer-bys are actually neighbours, the front garden space acts as a buffer zone between domestic sphere and the public realm of the suburban street. Therefore, the front garden does not fall within the spatial realms of the inner or outer lives, as conceptualised by Sennett, but stands ‘betwixt and between’ these two types of living space. This suggests that Sennett`s framework may be applicable to urban street spaces but not necessarily to suburbia.

Visuality and the front garden: Creating physical preconditions for prospect gazing

A prospect describes a spatial relationship where an observer can see across an extended spatial plane without any impediments to his or her vision (Appleton 1996). This sweep of observable landscape can be contrasted with the visual characteristics of a normal urban street, which are inherently ‘close-focused, restricted and canalised’ (Sharp 1946: 65). In contrast to the urban where there is no spatial distance between the households and the street pavements, the suburban garden spatially separates the houses from the street. This process of distancing is a necessary precondition for the emergence of a prospect. With regard to the front garden, the householder or the street observer have an interrupted view through the physical mediation of the garden: the householder can see out and the street passer-by can see in. One respondent in our survey preferred to keep his hedge low on the

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streetside in order to see passers-by when driving out his driveway. Another complained about the increasing dimensions of his garden trees as they ‘screen’ the house and the garden too much from the street and he consequently plans to remove them. Both of these respondents demonstrate their awareness of maintaining a prospect plane through their respective gardens. Therefore, the front garden not only functions as a buffer zone but its physical dimensions are also ‘levelled’ to maintain a prospect. This levelling is achieved by the domestic gardener cutting back hedges and shrubs, or even eliminating obstructing plants in order to have a prospect. Accordingly, a front garden prospect is determined by an observing individual who wishes to see across the garden from any angle and towards any direction.

In general, the view achieved through prospect gazing is one without people: a deserted street or an unoccupied garden. But other times the prospect observed can in actual fact be another viewing subject. Herein, the dynamics of the prospect visuality dramatically change, as this potential social interaction creates the conditions for intervisibility between two subjects which may or may not initiate social interaction. If so, the meandering span of the people less prospect is superseded by the more focused attention of two interacting subjectivities. Most of the interviews conducted in Dublin stress the importance of the garden for neighbourly interaction. They state that neighbours stop to talk as they pass by the garden, and they themselves also stop to talk to neighbours when they pass by their gardens and see the resident pottering around.

However, in the concrete situation of the front garden, the buffer zone’s ability to maintain the mutually inclusive aspect of the process of intervisibility is challenged by the occupant of the ‘inner life’ ability to hide while being able to continue to observe, – ‘to see

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without been seen’. Thus the occupant(s) of the inner life space is able to hide because this particular occupant is usually ‘embedded’ in the built edifice of the house. In this new form, the spatial extremity of the inner life along the buffer zone continuum emerges as a space which has a prospect but also is a physical ‘hide’ embedded in the concrete structure of the house. But at the other extremity of the buffer zone there appears another edifice of a wall or fence which ‘protects’ the buffer zone from intrusion. This is the bulwark!

The social functions of the ‘bulwark’ and the ‘hide’ in the buffer zone.

According to Appleton (1996), the essential feature of an observing subject is to have the protection of a refuge so that the ‘seer’ cannot be seen (p.91). Consequently, in Appleton’s framework, a refuge is diametrically opposite to the idea of prospect as the subject attempts to get out of the line of visibility and hide away from the peering eyes of others. However, we prefer to use the concept of the hide rather than the refuge as the hide in wildlife practices is more about camouflage than seeking security as in a refuge. And with regard to the concrete example of the front garden the hide crucially involves concealing the domestic observer from the passer- bys of the outer life sphere, – the street travellers.

In our analysis of the determinants of the front garden, this is the first opportunity we have to explore the relationship between front garden and house, particularly with regard to the socio-spatial functions of the garden vis-à-vis the house as a place of concealment. In the emergence of American suburbia in the nineteenth century, creating domestic privacy and establishing the home as refuge/hide was a determining factor in the architectural design of suburbia:

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The desire to be insulated from urban chaos prompted new architectural forms. Leading architects built houses which deliberately sheltered the well-to-do from the passer-by and the urban scene. [….] The middle class manipulated and formed its environment as a bulwark against the city (Kleinberg 1999: 147).

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There are several reasons for the ‘need’ of the suburban lawn. One reason is a desire to remove one’s family away from the rest of the population. This is exemplified in the fact that the middle class deliberately reshaped the landscape by surrounding single-family homes with yards in their new communities to strengthen the power of the family (Clarke 1986: 238).

And this was achieved by spatially reconfiguring the relationship of the domestic house to the public street by constructing a front garden between them:

‘Lawns, fences and distance from the urban core minimised intrusions, allowing the middle-class housewife to exercise control over her domain, safe from threats posed by outsiders. Instead of being situated directly on the street, suburban homes had a front garden and a large strip of lawn as green insulation from the threatening outside world’ (Kleinberg 1999: 148).

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Therefore, what is essential for this type of spatial ‘insulation’ to work is to have real or symbolic boundaries which are clearly defined and which act as a deterrent to the physical intrusion by ‘outsiders’, not only into the house but also towards it. In this spatial relationship, the front garden is bounded by the house at one end of the buffer zone, and a clearly identifiable barrier at the other end. The photographs of front gardens gathered in our survey gave a measure of the extent to which gardens were bounded spatial areas. All of our front gardens displayed clear and definite boundaries with adjacent gardens and the street. Dense hedges, palisades, walls, heavy fencing were used to maintain these boundaries. The great majority of our surveyed front gardens displayed definite boundaries between themselves and the street. Although, the bulwarks of the front garden were generally low, they acted as barriers to the physical movement of outsiders towards the house.

But if the bulwark of the garden impeded physical intrusion at one end of the buffer zone, certain physical features of the house itself restricted visual contact. For example, windows and glassed doors provide not only mediums to see out but also conceal the inner life of the house.

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2. The ‘hide’ of curtains.

This occurs in general on account of the differences in the intensity of light between the exterior and interior spaces of the house. As the major source of natural daylight is the sun, the exterior of building tends to be brighter than the interior space. And as Appleton suggests, light is conducive to seeing and deprivation of light is conducive to being not seen. This tendency to hide in the natural shade of the dwelling can be intensified by the hanging of net curtains or other opaque coverings. In our survey, we discovered that thirty eight out of the fifty investigated houses had a form of screen or light curtain hanging in their front windows, creating an advantage for the insider observer to engage in street gazing:

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The frame of a picture is like the frame of a window, and what better expresses the prospect-refuge complement than the old lady peering out on to the street from the gloom of an interior, veiled perhaps by net curtains, and hiding the greater part of her person behind the walls! By edging sideways beyond the frame of the window, she in a trice, achieve complete concealment. Strategically her situation is superb! (Appleton 1996: 114)

This physically advantageous position of the house for gazing upon the streetscape and its passer-bys, coupled with its inherent social forms of being a prospect and a hide simultaneously, creates the preconditions for the emergence of a novel, more dominating form of gazing – the panoptic gaze. To investigate this social form of the front garden, we need to turn to the theoretical works of Michel Foucault, and specifically his concepts of the panopticon.

The ‘gardened’ house as a panopticon:

Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977) argued that the emergence of disciplinary forms of power sought to spatially exclude and confine deviants from everyday society within specific institutions. These institutions were a necessary precondition for the emergence of modernity. But crucially the modern institutions were ‘housed’ in newarchitectural designs that allowed maximum surveillance over its inmates. The ultimate

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surveillance building was based upon Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon or Inspection-house design. Foucault described the architectural principles which this design was based upon:

….at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows light to cross the cell from one end to the other….By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery (p.200).

Our analysis shows that some (if not all) of these fundamental principles of the panoptic design are also evident in the spatial relationships between suburban houses, their front gardens and the street thoroughfare.

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3. The ‘panoptic’ garden.

These principles are physically mediated through and embedded in the structures of the front garden. The house ‘plays’ the role of the tower and the peripheric structure is the bulwark between garden and street. The crucial effect of backlighting described by Foucault is achieved in the front garden by the low height of the boundary, which frames passer-bys against the backdrop of neighbouring gardens, especially those that are on the opposite side of the street from the panoptic house/tower. Even though the passer-bys are not incarcerated inmates of the panopticon, they are captive to the powerful visibility of the panoptic mechanism of surveillance. Foucault (1977) expressed this idea in the phrase ‘visibility is a trap’ brought about by:

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The panoptic mechanism [which] arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately…. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the sidewalls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication (p.200).

In the panoptic complex of the suburban house, front garden, and streetscape, the inspector is now the inhabitant of the house and the ‘inmates’ are actually those people who pass by the front boundaries of the garden. Although the hypothetical tower is now flattened and the spatial location of the inmates and inspector are reversed, the same panoptic principles hold. What determines the continuing presence of the panoptic surveillance characteristics in our garden situation are the existence of the spatial boundaries which separate the ‘inspector’ from the ‘inmates’ and the maintenance of the visibility of the street ‘inmates’ by the domestic ‘inspector’ and thereby makes ‘it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately’. Also, because of the ‘hide-like’ effect of the differing contrasts between the exterior and interior of the house with regard to varying intensity of light, the inspector is generally hidden from view, in order to fulfil the basic requirement of the panoptic gaze, that is, to see without being seen. According to Foucault (1977), this dialectic relationship is expressed in the panopticon’s architectural structures:

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The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen (p.201–202).

In the concrete situation of the front garden, this panoptic ‘dissociation’ is also present, with the ‘panoptic’ house and the ‘distanced’ boundary bulwarks creating the physical conditions for the emergence of the panoptic gaze.

However, not all front gardens have this essential requirement of low boundary walls and fences. Our photographic survey revealed interesting contradictions with regard to the differing heights of the boundary walls and fences. Only in some of the rather exclusive, middle-class areas did we observe high and thick street boundaries, mainly in the form of privet hedge or high concrete walls. High boundaries hardly figured at all in the less exclusive neighbourhoods, and rarely on the street but some did exist between neighbouring gardens. Only eight out of the fifty residences investigated had such high street boundaries. Castleknock and Templeogue displayed the highest number (three each) of such boundaries. Overall, the reliance on high boundaries to protect privacy was not very widespread. More crucially perhaps, such boundaries were used to screen residents more from their neighbours than from the public gaze. High neighbouring boundaries protected the panoptic inspector from receiving similar surveillance to that he/she was engaged in and created a more exclusive form of privacy by preventing people looking in from the street. To use Foucault’s terminology, the sidewalls prevent him (now the panoptic inspector) from coming into contact with his companions (his immediate neighbours). This is especially true when solid gates compliment the high boundaries,

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creating a completely enclosed space which guarantees privacy by excluding all forms of public intrusion while allowing sufficient natural light to reach the house. More importantly, these contrasting functions – eliminating public gazing and getting adequate light – can only be achieved through adequate spatial distance between the house and the front boundary. Our observations show that the necessary space for absolute privacy is hardly ever available in less exclusive neighbourhoods. Instead, high street boundaries are an attribute of the properties of rich suburban dwellers.

The crucial difference between a prospect and panoptic gazing is that in the latter situation the mutual recognition of the viewing subjects across the buffer zone is undermined by the householders’ ability to see and not be seen by the street occupiers. In this situation of restricted intervisibility, the prying householder dominates: (s)he can stand and stare in the ‘comfort and security’ of their home space at the ‘inmates’ of the street without having to recognize the mutual subjectivity that the ‘objects’ of observation also possess. Unhindered by the need to perform ‘civility’, the panoptic gazer is free to ‘observe performances, to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications’(Foucault 1977: 203). Herein, lies the power structure of the panoptic mechanism, where the object of the panoptic gaze has no ability to engage in a similar process of categorization. This occurs because the street passer-by is unable to see his observer and therefore unable to categorize the occupier of the house. As we have already noted Foucault expressed this power relationship in the following way: ‘He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never the subject in communication’ (ibid., p. 200).

In contrast, the street passer-by has no ability to resist both observation and categorisation by the panoptic gazer. Attempts to overcome this dominating surveillance

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relationship and to put a face on the ‘faceless’ gazer are likely to remain unsuccessful. The observer will remain hidden or only appear as a shadowy figure in a window. What the passer-by will definitely see is the physical dimensions of the house. As a result, the abstract social process of panoptic visuality ‘embeds’ itself permanently in the architecturalstructures of the house. This material manifestation of a social process preserves the activity of panoptic surveillance beyond the duration of observing. In a very real sense, the physical reification of panoptic visuality is achieved when the passer-bys become aware of the house and the physical structures of the front garden as the focal point of the panoptic social process (7).

The aesthetic visuality: Its ‘coming into being’ and its specific social form

The front garden contains not only man-made surfaces and architectural structures which mediate and subsequently help to reproduce the various social forms of visuality but is also characterised by a plethora of natural processes and objects which are central to the the relationship between society and its spatial setting. Nature in the front garden both helps and hinders the societal process of visuality while adding an aesthetic dimension. Accordingly, nature is aestheticized in various designed frameworks which present these front gardens for public display. Whiston Spirn (1997) emphasises not only the natural and artificial aspects of gardens but also how they are a consequence of designed forms:

Whether wild or clipped, composed of curved lines or straight, living plants and plastic, every garden is a product of natural phenomena and human artifice. […]

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Landscape architects construct nature both literally and figuratively, but the history of twentieth century landscape architecture has being told as a history of forms rather than a history of ideas and rhetorical expression (p.249–257).

These forms of garden designs are essentially about how plants and built artefacts are arranged in spatial relationships with each other to form a composition. And because gardens are about ‘coaxing and persuading’ nature into prearranged spatial relationships, and ornamental shapes, they take on aspects of social forms. The social construction of plants as ornamental and architectural structures of the garden is put in practice by purposely rearranging the spatial relationships between the plants, by manicuring the surface appearances of the plants, through trimming, pruning or mowing, and finally, by eliminating undesirable plants through mechanical weeding and the use of herbicides. Theresult is a certain ‘pictorial look’ which celebrates an aesthetic rendition (Crandell 1993).

The history of this ‘pictorial look’ goes back to the picturesque parks and landscape gardens of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown whose construction coincided with the modernisation and industrialisation of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. These gardens were designed to look like painted pictures and were subsequently called the gardens of the picturesque. This picturesque characteristic was essential to designing a natural feel to these gardens. And although the picturesque garden had an ideology of appreciating nature as a ‘soothing retreat from modern urbanism’ (Helmreich 1997: 84), it was a highly artificial creation, relying on horticultural manipulation and technology. As the lawn was dominant spatial entity of the picturesque, its aesthetic ‘look’ was initially

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maintained by animal power. Livestock grazing was the ‘technology’ of lawn production prior to the invention of the lawnmower in 1830 (Lowen 1991: 50).

But behind the pictorial appearance of the garden was the ideology of the rural idyllic and an inherent anti-urbanism (Slater 2007). According to this view, the desired spatial location for human habitation was to be the ‘gardened’ landscapes of the rural countryside rather than urban cities and towns. In consequence, living this ideal meant moving towards the countryside and constructing as much as possible the Brownian landscape, including the essential feature of the grass lawn. As a consequence, the pastoral ideal fuelled an urban exodus, beginning with society’s elite and their landed estates in the eighteenth century, and then moving down to the upper middle classes and the emergence of suburbia in America and Britain in the nineteenth century (Bormann et al. 1993; Jackson 1985). The spatial expansion and subsequent suburbanisation of many Western cities also brought about the diffusion and ‘mainstreaming’ of Brownian design conventions. This trend is reflected in varying attempts to incorporate the essential physical characteristics of the Brownian landscape with decreasing housing lot sizes in the ever expanding suburbia. Water features tended to be eliminated, while the lawn, and to a lesser extent the trees were retained. The pure Brownian landscape was being diluted as it shrunk in physical size, leaving fewer physical icons to represent the romantic rural idyllic. It is from here that the front garden aesthetic comes into being in suburbia (Fishman 1987).

The evolution of the picturesque garden from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, which is rooted in the ‘artful’ cultivation of nature through various types of gardening labour processes, also allows us to chart the changing relationship between human society and physical environment. The apparently ‘natural’ appearance of the

29

garden tends to disguise not only its manufactured origins but also those historically embedded social processes of visuality which directed its production. And while plants remain within the realm of the natural ecosystem, they are also ‘culturalised’ and ‘perform’ various types of aesthetic functions within the overall ‘pictorial’ composition of the garden.

One of the crucial aesthetic functions of plants is to soften the hard textures and the break-up the continuous sharp-edged lines of the built artefacts of the front garden including the house. For example, Ingram (1982) proposes that trees not only ‘soften’ the lines of the house but he also identifies particular shapes in the ‘architectural’ structure of trees in order to perform this ‘softening’ role:

Vertical lines of many houses can be effectively softened by small tree planted in conjunction with other plants at a corner. Tree shape is very important. A low- branched, rounded tree softens this line while a slender upright tree only accents the line (p.12).

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4. The ‘softening’ by nature.

Another use of natural entities in the social setting of the garden, according to Ingram (1982), is to help the garden observer to visually appreciate the ‘pictorial look’ presented:

A moderate amount of open area in the front yard can create the feeling of a large expansive area that allows the observer’s eye to move from the street to the planted areas (p.13).

In ‘creating a feeling’ or producing a ‘visual effect’ the gardener is performing an artistic act similar to a painter of landscape. In fact, gardeners use the same artistic conventions in

31

producing the ‘effect’ of perspective as landscape painters. Rose (1983) advises his readers to engage in these perspective tricks:

‘To obtain a greater feeling of space, narrow plots may have to be ‘widened’ and short plots ‘lengthened’ artificially by playing perspective tricks, such as leading the eye across the plot to make a narrow area look deceptively wide. Lines leading down the garden away from the eye will give the impression of greater length. This can be heightened by reducing the width of such features as terraces, paths or beds as they run down the garden. [….] These simple perspective tricks work remarkably well and are very easy to contrive’ (p.16).

In covering various types of surfaces within the garden and those of its boundaries, the natural forms of plants not only ‘naturalise’ but also unify the setting by masking over the diverse physical differences of built structures. In summary, garden plants function as an aesthetic veneer and are the most visible concrete form in which a garden becomes an object of display in itself.

Nature within the social forms of visuality

As stated previously, panoptic visuality is maintained through specific spatial relationships between house, garden and street. Consequently, the architectural aspects of the garden, including its plants, must respond to these spatial requirements. Since the panoptic process determines the physical layout of the front garden, at least to some extent, the aesthetic

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form of the gardens tends to operate within particular spatial confines. Consequently, the aesthetic veneer both reflects and reproduces many of the panoptic physical structures. Plants and man-made structures such as paths, paving stones and pots produce and maintain panoptic structures, and at the same time reflect and reproduce aesthetic standards. Plants thus perform social and cultural functions but also retain their natural characteristics. They have their own developmental tendencies and exist independent from their respective social functions. As Marx commented in a letter to Kugelmann, dated 1868:

No natural laws can be done away with. What can change is the form in which these laws operate (Marx and Engels 1934: 246).

In the case of the front garden, the form in which the natural laws operate is determined by the panoptic and aesthetic dimensions of visuality. For example, the lawn is a crucial spatial component for both prospect and panoptic visuality. The inherent ‘flatness’ of the lawn facilitates observation from a distance while its aesthetic form can act as a backdrop or foil for more dramatic displays of shrubs, hedges and tree (Strong 1994:108). But it must be kept mowed:

Lawn is a canvass on which the rest of the plantings are placed. A beautiful lawn will enhance any landscape, while a poor lawn will detract from the overall appearance (McCarty et al. 1995: 3).

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The attractiveness of the lawn ‘canvass’ or canopy is minimally maintained by the continuous labour process of mowing. Mowing creates a new natural form in which the grass ecosystem has to now operate under. This modified ecosystem loses not only the embedded nutrients with the disposal of the grass clippings but also those naturally occurring activities which take place in the upper sections of the grass plant above the cut line. Such activities include the storage of water, the flowering of the plant and the production of seeds. These missing activities within the modified grass ecosystem have subsequently to be replaced by various forms of human intervention, such as irrigation, over-seeding and the application of fertilizer and other forms of chemical inputs (Bormann et al., 1993). Ironically, a ‘natural’ lawn which is imbued with an aesthetic countenance has a tendency to look artificial:

Lawn-making is the art that conceals art: it is, in fact, the only aspect of gardening that hides both the work done and the nature of the plant life itself. A lawn that achieves perfection ceases to look like plant matter and resembles a fake version of itself. It has no bumps, no weeds, and no variations in colour: from a distance, the perfect close-mown lawn is indistinguishable from Astroturf (Fulford 1998: 1)

Accordingly, the labour process of mowing is not just about an attempt to reify the naturally tendencies of the grass to growth vertically towards the sunlight. It is also about human intervention: rendering the grass lawn as an aesthetic object which is ‘constructed’ by the household gardener for its display characteristics (Jenkins 1994). A ‘poor’ lawnoccurs when the natural ecosystem breaks out of its aesthetic straitjacket (Feagan and

34

Ripmeester 1991). The immediate effect is that the lawn canopy breaks up as the grass grows into clumps and dykes of differing heights. As a consequence, the smooth texture of the lawn canopy is lost. It can be restored by mowing and subsequently putting the grass ecosystem back into its ‘iron cage’ of the panoptic and aesthetic forms of human intervention. Therefore, the natural tendency of lawns and other plant ecosystems in the front garden is to counteract the imposed social forms. For example, without human intervention through the labour process of trimming, hedges may take on ‘an unpleasing shape’ that resists panoptic and aesthetic forms:

Left unclipped to grow as it pleases this hedging will develop an unpleasing shape. Radical pruning can be used to remodel it (Rose 1983: 18).

And herein lies the relentless struggle which takes place in both front and back garden and which is symbolic of the ever present contradiction between nature and society. The restless powers of nature, determined by its inherent laws of motion (growth), are pitted against societal forces which manifest themselves in various types of gardening labour processes. These labour processes attempt to give the plant ecosystem a societal countenance within an idealised spatial location which is of necessity at variance to its naturally occurring countenance of the plants within their own organic environment. Nature organically blossoms, while society attempts to reify. Hence in the garden the ‘superstructure’ of nature is humanized while the ‘base’ of humanly built structures is naturalized (Smith 1990: 19). Naturally, these processes do not exist independent of each other but are intertwined through a metabolic relationship (Foster 1999). According to Smith, it was Marx’s concept

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of a societal metabolism that opened up a completely new understanding of man’s relationship to nature and its connections with the labour process:

Labour process…. regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces…in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adopted to his needs (Marx 1976: 283, in Smith 1990: 19).

The ‘needs’ in our case are adopted to the social forms of visuality which have ‘metabolized’ with the natural forces of the plant ecosystems to produce the phenomenon of the suburban front garden.

The ‘distracted’ glance of the neighbourhood passer-by

A crucial aspect of the front garden, as we have argued in this paper, is its visuality, which shapes its spatial qualities in complex ways. It determines not only the layout of the garden but also many of the activities that take place within it. However, although visuality is a key social determinant of the garden, it also takes on different functional forms which can come into conflict with each other. Contradictions between the aesthetic and the panoptic forms of visualities can manifest themselves in diverse ways. The propensity of the passer- by to look away from the panopticon of the house in order to avoid being identified and categorised constitutes one possible outcome. Attempting to conceal one’s subjectivity is helped by never stopping to stare at the panopticon. ‘Passing by’ in this context becomes a

36

crucial form of resistance to panoptic surveillance. Therefore, whatever type of gaze that the passer-by may engage in, it will have to be one which is done while moving. This inherent reaction to the ‘panopticon surveillance machine’ on behalf of the passer-by is that of continuing mobility. ‘Passing-by’ in this context becomes a crucial form of resistance to the panoptic gaze. However, this situation of the need to continual move is at adherence to the ideal position needed to engage in the aesthetic gaze.

The aesthetic role of the front garden has determined one of its essential characteristics, that is, its exhibition value (Benjamin 1992: 218). Benjamin (1992) has argued that the exhibition value is about creating an object so that it can be put on view and visually appropriated by others than the producers. But this visual form of appropriation is achieved in a state of concentration, where ‘a man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it’ (Benjamin 1992: 241). However, the reception of the front garden as a work of art with exhibition value needs to be achieved not only in a state of mental concentration but one in which the connoisseur is in a physical stationary position. But this desired state of concentration cannot be achieved by our passer-by as the panoptic visuality cuts across the potential aesthetic experience of the garden as he/she is propelled to keep moving in order to avoid the surveillance of the panopticon. Caught ‘betwixt and between’ the aesthetic and the panoptic forms of visuality, the passer-by can only give a fleeting glance at the aesthetic garden display. Savage (2000) has interpreted Benjamin’s conceptualisation of this situation as a state of distraction:

‘Reception of art in a state of distraction, however, does not involve ‘rapt attention [but] noticing the object in an incidental fashion’ (Benjamin, p.242) … Benjamin

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makes it clear that architecture offers the best example of an art from which is perceived in distraction, by passers-by. […] distracted passer-by gaze at buildings only in passing’ (p. 46).

While caught in a state of distraction not caused by ‘habit’ of familiarity (Benjamin 1992: 233) but by the ever-present process of panoptic visuality, our suburban passer-bys can only glance fleetingly at their front garden ‘works of art’.

Conclusions

In our analysis of the determinants of the suburban front garden we discovered that it was determined by an ensemble of diverse social and natural processes. These combined metabolic relationships between nature and society is located at many intersections of this metabolic system. The only common aspect of these diverse levels of interaction is that it occurs during gardening labour processes. However, the gardening labour processes are themselves distinguished by the type of social entity they are producing. These social entities or forms in the context of the front garden we conceptualised as forms of visuality, the prospect, the panoptic and the aesthetic. Accordingly, the particular combination between nature and society under the social form of the aesthetic will be quite different from that under the panoptic visuality. The latter moulds the natural structures of the plant ecosystem to enhance the visibility of the street from the house, while the former attempts to construct the natural plantings as an exhibitionary objects, to be neighbourly ‘works of art’. As a consequence, the metabolic relationship between nature and society with regard to the front garden can not be explicated at a general level, such as the garden entity as a

38

whole, but only at the particular level of the social forms of production, which in the case of the front garden are the diverse forms of visuality. Any search for a general definition of this metabolic relationship will be remain within the mists of idealism, or the specific sociological version of this type of idealism, sociologism.

Similarly, with regard to understanding the relationship between the private and the public spheres. ‘Public’ accessibility to the front garden is very much determined by the particular social form of visibility which the outsider attempts to gain access through. For example, the panoptic process of visuality and its crucial physical structure/moment of the boundary bulwark prevents any form of physical intrusion into the garden, while the aesthetic form actually encourages the passing public to gaze within. These contradictions and others which we identified in our introduction we can now explain the actual circumstances they come about and how they are an intrinsic part of the suburban front garden, – a spatial entity determined by diverse social forms of visuality.

Postscript

But in order to get a better understanding of this crucial metabolic relationship between society and nature, we believe that it is necessary to develop our analysis further in two opposing directions, – one empirical, – the other theoretical. With regard to the empirical, we propose that it would be worthwhile to examine other leisure spaces, such as public parks, golf courses and turf playing surfaces, where the social forms are not just visual but also may possess a social form which extols durability and resilience to footfall. The apparent contradiction between the social forms of visuality and durability would be

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interesting to investigate how they impact on the natural process of the plant structures in contradictory ways. The theoretical direction which we also believe is worth pursuing is that which would involve pushing the theoretical apparatus of this paper onto another level (or stage) into the actual internal metabolic structures of the plants themselves in order to uncover how the social forms of visuality of the garden determine the metabolic processes of the plants. Involved in this level of analysis would be to examine how the gardener reconstitutes the metabolic conditions of the plant ecosystem in order to enhance the social form of their visuality. Subsequently, it will be necessary to assess how gardener uses artificial chemicals to realize the ‘visual effect’. To achieve this deeper understanding of the socio-ecological metabolism of the plant ecosystem, we also contend that it is necessary to investigate not only the changing propensity of chemicals both natural and artificial to flow through the metabolic pathways of the plant but crucially also the actual changing structures of the metabolic pathways themselves. The grass lawn looks likely to be the most appropriate plant ecosystem for this type of research as it is the spatially the most dominant plant ecosystem in the front gardens of suburbia.

Eamonn Slater is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has edited two books with his colleague, Prof. Michel Peillon, Encounters with Modern Ireland, (1998) and Memories of the Present, (2000). He has published a range of articles on the Political Economy of nineteenth century Ireland, on Irish landscape, and various aspects of the sociology of Irish culture. He is currently doing research on Marx’s ideas on colonialism of Ireland and its ecological impact on Irish agriculture in the nineteenth century.

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Michel Peillon is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has co-edited five volumes of the Irish Sociological Series. His research interests include stratification and class, state and political life, social movements, welfare and immigration. He is currently engaged in the study of urban living, the social appropriation of urban space, collective life in the suburbs and urban social movements.

FOOTNOTES.

1. The authors would like to thank Aine McDonough, who carried out the photographic survey for our Dublin suburban garden project. The project was funded by NIRSA.
2. According to Banaji, Marx best expressed his method of presentation as an ‘expanding curve’ or spiral-movement composed of specific cycles of abstraction. Each cycle of abstraction begins and ends in the realm of appearances while the intervening analysis is concerned with the essential abstract form which determines the specific structure of that particular cycle:‘In the dialectical method of development the movement from the abstract to concrete is not a straight-line process. One returns to the concrete at expanded levels of the total curve, reconstructing the surface of society by ‘stages’, as a structure of several dimensions. Andthis implies, finally, that in Marx’s Capital we shall find a continuous ‘oscillation between essence and appearance ’ (Banaji, 1979,40).
3. Hayward argued that ‘this metabolism is regulated from the side of nature by the natural laws governing the various physical processes involved, and from the side of society by institutionalised norms governing the division of labour and the distribution of wealth etc.(within Capitalism). It is through the labour process that the social processes of society metabolizes with the processes of nature:

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‘Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He sets in motion the natural forces….., in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adopted to his own needs…..He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power’ (Capital, vol.1:284).

4. The central concerns of the above ‘garden’ sociologists have reflected a general trend in sociology in the 1990s and that has been the emergence of the cultural ‘turn’ in sociology. And as Buttel stresses cultural sociology in particular and conventional sociology in general for the most part of the twentieth century has paid little attention to the biophysical environment (Buttel 1996).

5. 5  It could be argued that the Sociology of the front garden fell into the same theoretical trap as Marx suggested that Political Economy did with regard to private property, in that Political Economy proceeded from the fact of private property. It did not explain how it came into existence. In a similar criticism of Sociology, it could also be suggested that Sociology proceeds from the fact of the visualiness of the front garden. But crucially, it does not explain it.
6. 6  According to Jack Ingels the focalization of interest is the principle of design that selects and positions visually strong items into the landscape composition. Focal points can be created using plants, hardscape items and architectural elements (Ingels, 2004:133).
7. 7  This is becomes apparent when we remember that the passer-bys in their own respective abodes are themselves potential panoptic observers.

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This article explores how a form of visuality—the picturesque—became the essential framework for the emergence of theme parks on the landed estates of Anglo-Irish landlords during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially, the cultural forms of the picturesque evolved from the disciplines of landscape painting and the philosophy of aesthetics. These forms later became the design principles guiding the English Informal style of gardening. As a result, the original abstract concepts of the picturesque became physically embedded in the Irish landscape ecosystems, establishing these spatial enclaves as a picturesque theme park.

In becoming spatialized, the colonial ideology of the picturesque—designing the Irish landscape to resemble the English landscape—became a colonized space that was inherently hegemonic with regard to the native sense of place. By physically embedding the picturesque visual principles into the local ecosystems, the cultural forms of the picturesque took on ecological dimensions. Here, aesthetic forms of society merged with the natural forms of plants and their metabolic systems.

And in ‘naturalizing’ the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, any portrayal of a scene from the theme park tended to replicate the hegemonic position of the picturesque as the dominant place ideology. Since the portrayal tended to reproduce what the writer or artist actually saw, the problem was that the scenes were already changed and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality. This picturesque visuality fell from its dominant position with the decline of Irish landlordism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The capacity for seeing (nature) with the painters’ eye was the Picturesque vision.

(Richard Payne Knight)

Where power was, there beauty shall reside.

(Ann Bermingham)

No natural laws can be done away with. What can change is the form in which these laws operate.

(Karl Marx)

For the house of the planter is known by the trees.

(Austin Clarke)

Introduction: A brief history of the complex cultural forms of the picturesque

This article explores how a new form of visuality—the Picturesque—became the dominant framework through which the Irish landscape was interpreted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially consisting of painterly concepts that emerged from Italian landscape painting in the seventeenth century, the picturesque was theoretically developed in the eighteenth-century philosophy of aesthetics. These cultural forms of the picturesque subsequently became an interpretative mechanism through which landscape connoisseurship emerged as an elite cultural activity among Ireland’s landed gentry. Later, these ideological forms of the picturesque became the accepted principles that guided the design dicta of the English informal style of gardening in rural Ireland.

In becoming a gardening design framework, the cultural and ideological forms of the picturesque took on a material structure as these abstract concepts became embedded into the natural structures of the local landscape ecosystems. It is at this point that the gardeners of the informal English style responded to the cultural forms of the picturesque, and crucially where the cultural forms of this ideological circulation process of the picturesque entered into a material production process resulting in the picturesque landscape becoming a theme park. A theme park that not only reflected the contradictory cultural forms of the picturesque but also took on a spatial dimension where the design principles of the English informal garden attempted to transform the material structures of the Irish landscape by creating ‘little Englands’ in Ireland. These spatial enclaves on the landlord’s demesne, protected behind high walls, became a colonised space where the hegemonic picturesque held sway over the native sense of place.

This theme park and its cultural forms of the picturesque closed down when the legal buttress of landlordism fell in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We begin our analysis with a travelogue account of Ireland in the early 1840s.

A ‘picturesque’ travelogue to nineteenth-century Ireland

Travelogue writing on Ireland had its formative period from 1775 to 1850. The greatest travel writers of this period were Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall. They undertook several tours of Ireland in the early 1840s, from which they compiled a travelogue published in several editions. Their stated purpose was to induce visits to Ireland, especially from mainland Britain:

“Those who require relaxation from labour, or may be advised to seek health under the influence of a mild climate, or search for sources of novel and rational amusement, or draw from a change of scene a stimulus to wholesome excitement, or covet acquaintance with the charms of nature, or wish to study a people full of original character—cannot project an excursion to any part of Europe that will afford a more ample recompense.”

In this opening statement, the Halls ideologically constructed Ireland as a place of escape, where one can depart from the routines of British everyday life and engage with exotic peoples living in a natural environment. What is strange about this construct is that it could be applied to Ireland at this particular period since the reality for the majority of Irish people was suffering from crushing poverty with no hope of escape. Therefore, the Halls seem to be evading the economic reality of mass poverty by encouraging their travelogue readers to see Ireland as a landscape picture:

“Wicklow is the garden of Ireland; its prominent feature is, indeed, sublimity—wild grandeur, healthful and refreshing; but among its high and bleak mountains there are numerous rich and fertile valleys, luxuriantly wooded and with the most romantic rivers running through them, forming in their course, an endless variety of cataracts. Its natural graces are enhanced in value, because they are invariably encountered after the eye and mind have been wearied from gazing upon the rude and uncultivated districts, covered with peat, upon the scanty herbage of which the small sheep can scarcely find pasture… Usually, the work of nature has been improved by the skill of Art, and it is impossible to imagine a scene more sublime and beautiful than the one of these ravines, of which there are so many.”

In this description, the pictorial quality of Wicklow’s landscape is structured on the syntax of the sentences. The Halls’ way of proceeding is to follow the description of the ‘high and bleak mountains’ with a description of the ‘rich and fertile valleys’. The syntax is sequenced around the word ‘after’, and this syntactical structure of the passage is not only imitating a viewing process but also a downward glance. The Halls have ‘placed’ their readers in the position of a commanding vantage point, allowing them to ‘see’ a wide sweep of the landscape. According to John Barrell, the main point in ‘constructing’ a textual viewing point is that it creates an imaginary space between the landscape and the spectator (reader), similar in effect to the real space between a picture and whoever is looking at it. This descriptive technique conveys the original sense of the picturesque—that which is capable of being represented in a picture.

However, on closer examination of the Halls’ text, another level in which their narrative celebrates the compositional techniques of the picturesque landscape painting of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin can be identified. According to Ernst Gombrich, Lorraine and Poussin employed alternating bands of light and darkness to create depth in their paintings to establish a foreground, middle ground, and background to their compositions. Such Claudean compositional techniques can be identified in the Halls’ account of the Irish landscape in the following passage:

“Descending from any one of the hills, the moment the slope commences, the prospect becomes cheering beyond conception; all that wood, rock, and water—infinitely varied—can do to render a scene grand and beautiful, has been wrought in the valley over which the eye wanders; trees of every form and hue, from the lightest and the brightest green, to the sombre brown, or—made so by distance—the deepest purple; rivers, of every possible character, from the small thread of white that trickles down the hill-side, to the broad and deep current that rushes along, furiously, a mass of foam and spray.”

In identifying the differing colour tones of the trees and streams, the Halls locate the spatial characteristics associated with perspective similar to that achieved by the picturesque painters. However, not only do the Halls use the compositional spatial patterns employed by Claude and Poussin, but they also used the same aesthetic categories. These were categories of the beautiful and the sublime, and they formed themselves into a dualism. Following the publication of Edmund Burke’s “The Origin of our Ideas about the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757, the sublime and the beautiful became identified in the public mind as a pair of binary opposites. On one side of this dichotomy, the notion of the beautiful was held to consist of smooth flowing lines, smoothness of surface, and clear, bright colours. Stuart has even suggested that beneath the veil of Burke’s attempt at the analysis of beauty can be seen the gentle form of a woman’s body. The sublime was altogether an opposing quality that created an awe-inspiring and fearful feeling.

In the second passage from the Halls, the concept of the sublime was applied to the ‘rude and uncultivated districts, covered with peat’ of the ‘high and bleak mountains’, while the beautiful was located in the ‘rich and fertile valleys’ where ‘the work of nature has been improved by the skill of Art’. Accordingly, the spatial difference established by the aesthetic dichotomy was further complemented by the new dichotomy of art/nature. This particular dichotomy distinguishes natural wilderness from manmade cultivation. These dichotomies complement each other as they incorporate each other within similar spatial locations. The sublime and natural wilderness is applied to the ‘high and bleak mountains’, while the man-made landscape of the ‘fertile valleys’ is defined as beautiful. All of these techniques of description found within the Halls’ travelogue suggest their overall framework should be described as picturesque. These principles of composition borrowed from the painterly tradition of the picturesque created a new type of visuality, which moved from the medium of painting to that of travelogue writing and the philosophy of aesthetics.

This new visuality of the picturesque was not a passive activity; it was a process that involved reconstructing the landscape in the imagination according to the compositional principles of the picturesque. As a consequence of this mental process of composition, objects in the real landscape and their surface appearances were conceptually structured into new relationships with each other, determined by their visual characteristics within the overall framework of the picturesque. This mediated relationship of the picturesque and its compositional principles had to be learned, and were indeed learned so thoroughly that it became impossible for anyone with an aesthetic interest in landscape to look at the countryside without applying them, whether or not they knew they were doing so.

The Halls did not just provide a guide to Ireland’s picturesque locations; they also created a framework that helped the landscape connoisseur to evaluate the picturesque qualities within identified locations—as the following suggests: “The glen is little more than a mile in length; and midway a small moss-house has been erected; to our minds, the structure—although exceedingly simple—dist

urbed the perfect solitude of the place; where the work of the artificer ought not to be recognized.” The adequacy of the moss-house in the Halls’ text and in the specificity of its picturesque framework was determined not by its use-value, but by its surface appearance within the landscape of the glen. Its subsequent condemnation as an aesthetic object was conditioned by its social form; it was physically constructed, contrasting negatively with the natural forms of the glen. However, an important question emerges from the moss-house quotation: Who is the ‘artificer’ of the condemned moss-house?

‘Planting’ the cultural forms of the picturesque in Ireland

The picturesque artificer in the above quotation was the landlord. Due to the landlords’ ownership of the land, they were the only ones with the power and capital to physically reshape the landscape in a picturesque way. The perilous legal position of the Irish tenantry regarding land occupancy, and the smallness of their holdings, prevented them from redesigning the Irish landscape on the grand scale required by the picturesque. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, it was the Anglo-Irish landlords who began to redesign their demesnes according to the dictates of the picturesque. For this to happen, the abstract concept of the picturesque jumped from ideological texts into concrete reality in the form of the English informal style of landscape gardening.

According to Reeves-Smith, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the parkland of the demesnes occupied around 800,000 acres, or 4 percent of Ireland’s landmass, with over 7,000 houses featuring pleasure landscapes of ten acres or more. The English Informal or picturesque garden was itself a rejection of the rigid formality of the Dutch and French styles. The greatest exponent of this English style was Capability Brown. The Brownian landscape was worked in three elements alone: wood, water, and grass. The old formal gardens were ploughed over, avenues left to wander like country lanes; the vista from the window became one of gently rolling greenery, with cunningly placed clumps of trees in natural positions. Although engendering a spirit of simplicity, this picturesque garden created subtle changes to people’s relationship to their landscape. According to Stuart, Brown’s most famous contribution was to create a transition from a landscape seen in two dimensions to a landscape fully integrated in three dimensions: landscape as a sculpture, rather than as a painting. The Brownian landscape was a designed set to be walked through rather than a mere stationary view from the ‘Big House’. As a consequence, the ‘garden’ began to move away from the immediate environs of the house and, in many cases, out of sight of the house itself, creating an even more natural feel to the redesigned landscape.

Although Capability Brown never made it to Ireland, he had his Irish disciples, most notably Dean Swift and the Delanys. The following is a typical informal Brownian ‘garden’ as described by the Halls: ‘In the demesne of Altadore, a small glen called the ‘Hermitage’, for which nature has done much, and art more. And here is another of the magnificent waterfalls for which the country is so famous. It is but one of the many attractions in this delicious spot; the grounds have been laid out with exceeding taste, the walks through it are very varied; and considerable judgment and skill have been exhibited in planting and ‘trimming’—the one being even more necessary than the other where the growth is rapid and luxuriant—as to obtain a new and striking view almost at every step.’

The Halls’ account oscillates between describing the naturally occurring forms of nature and artificial constructions, reflecting their tendencies to interpenetrate each other in the concrete reality of the garden itself. With regard to ‘planting and trimming’, the social process of design is combined with the natural processes of the plants, the ‘rapid and luxuriant growth’. As a consequence, the artificial aspects of ‘this delicious spot’, except for the physical walkways, tend to be disguised—hidden from view because the artificial features of the garden are in its design. In manicuring the surface appearance of the plants and purposely arranging the spatial relationships between the natural entities of the new ecosystem of the English Informal garden to ‘mimic’ the visual characteristics of the picturesque framework, the gardener was ‘redesigning’ nature in an idealistic way.

Thus, the construction of a picturesque ‘spot’, like the Hermitage above, is a result of an intended manipulation of nature to reflect an image and ideology concerning society’s relationship to nature. The ‘natural’ garden of the picturesque is, therefore, in a real concrete sense, an embodied ideology. Gallagher suggests that the emergence of the English informal garden in the middle of the eighteenth century indicated a societal change of perspective towards nature in general. The new perspective of the picturesque saw man’s position as being within nature itself, rather than as an agent to tame and regulate its forces as in the Dutch and French formal gardens. In the picturesque, nature cannot be conquered and at best only certain aspects of it can be manicured by society for its own ends. This tension between nature and society is materially manifested in the spatial difference between the beautiful and sublime aspects of the picturesque landscape as revealed in the following from the Hall’s description of the Crampton estate at Lough Bray:

‘The wall that surrounds these grounds is not, in some places as high as the bank of peat within a few feet of it, and the contrast between the neglect, the desolation, the barrenness that reign without, and the beauty within, is very striking, exhibiting the mastery which science and civilization hold over nature even in her sternest and most rugged domain. The cottage and grounds are here, in this lofty and unreclaimed region, ‘like Tadmor in the wilderness, or an oasis in the desert’.’

The spatial contrast between ‘the neglect and the barrenness’ of the bog outside the walls with the ‘order and cultivation’ of the garden within is further conceptualized in the aesthetic dualism of the beautiful and the sublime. The ‘beautiful’ in the above quotation, which exhibits the application of ‘science and civilization’, is located within the walls of the parkland. On the other hand, the sublime refers to the wilderness of the peat bog without. As a consequence, the sublime aspect of the picturesque could only be appropriated visually into the picturesque landscape as a backdrop to the beautiful within the garden itself. The landscape gardener could only physically reshape the beautiful aspects of the picturesque—those within the walls of the parkland—by constructing water features such as artificial lakes and meandering rivers, and planting alternating bands of grass and trees in the foreground and middle ground of the parkland. The sublime features of the picturesque could not be planted successively in the parkland without losing those characteristics which define them as sublime (i.e., being truly ‘natural’ and ‘awe-inspiring and fearful feeling’). These sublime characteristics can only be achieved by looking into the vast uncultivated wastes of bog land beyond the comfortable confines of the ‘beautiful’ walled gardens.

The ‘politics’ of the picturesque in Ireland: The 5 detached peasantry of the sublime

The landlords of Ireland were pivotal in the picturesque movement, commissioning journeymen painters to depict their demesnes in this style, educating their families in the connoisseurship of romantic, picturesque principles, and constructing picturesque gardens on their estates. The Halls, in their travelogue, explicitly praise the ‘beautiful spots’ of the picturesque, acknowledging the landlords’ gardening endeavors. However, this public appreciation likely had a practical aspect, as permission was needed from the landlords to access these spots. In County Wicklow, the Halls identify twelve owners of sixteen picturesque locations, with villages and towns mentioned only in passing. This perspective reflects the culture of the picturesque adopted by the landowning elite, which proved repressive to the native, peasant population and their sense of place.

By focusing solely on the picturesque aspects of the landed estates, the Halls’ narrative omits the working, productive aspects of these estates, fostering the notion of a socially empty space and ideologically detaching the peasantry from the landscape. This omission mirrors the silences of seventeenth-century cartographers who excluded the cabins of the native Irish from their maps, effectively erasing the peasantry from the picturesque narrative of Ireland.

The picturesque’s definition of certain areas as ‘hovels’ had significant implications for the occupants, suggesting that the nineteenth-century maps imposed a spatial discipline on the rural peasantry similar to the time discipline imposed on industrial workers by the clock. The picturesque introduced an aesthetic discipline, barring the peasantry from accessing land for productive purposes and leading to evictions when their dwellings were deemed unsightly for the picturesque landscape.

Edward Said views this spatial coercion as a form of geographical violence, part of an act of geographical violence through imperialism, where every space is explored, charted, and controlled. The picturesque in Ireland underwent similar stages of cultural imperialism, with picturesque connoisseurs exploring and capturing new spots, and controlling access to conserve them for their enjoyment, effectively barring the local population from these areas.

The picturesque’s transformation of the Irish landscape and the introduction of foreign flora species were part of a broader cultural and ecological expansion that followed the routes of the British Empire. While most introduced species integrated into the Irish ecosystems without much disruption, some, like the rhododendron, proved problematic. Despite the picturesque’s imposed nature, the aesthetic experience it provided was generally pleasing to the strolling connoisseur, masking the reality of its enforced imposition and creating ideological enclaves within the parklands.

The Picturesque Theme Park

The spatial aspect of the picturesque was crucial to the emergence of the picturesque as a theme park. Here, at the concrete level of spatial relationships, the circulation of the cultural picturesque forms allowed the garden design to move through space and time and circulate as commodities. Therefore, this social process of circulation of the picturesque began its life as an ideological perspective in the paintings and texts of its connoisseurs. This had a specific structure to it (its visuality) and a particular history of development over time and space (its cultural connoisseurship in the Romantic Movement). The actual spatial realization of this ideological perspective was achieved in the gardening techniques of the English informal style, where the garden designs of the picturesque consciously reflected the sensibilities of the picturesque in the spatial arrangements between the plants. The ‘planting’ of the picturesque constructed its location as a cultural enclave within a wider landscape of the Irish countryside. According to Crandell:

“This is the pivotal moment in the pictorialization of nature: what is designed (and owned) is composed to give the illusion of being natural, when in fact it is maintained as an enclave. To create the illusion, Brown’s garden used compositional conventions taken from painting. … Increasingly it meant something visual: a forested landscape with serpentine clearings.”

The picturesque enclave was therefore a constructed environment, owned and controlled by the landed gentry. It was their and their advisors’ interpretation of the picturesque that prevailed in the garden. The dominance of the designers/landlords in constructing their own specific version of the picturesque within these spatial enclaves was necessary to prevent the emergence of alternative ‘realities’, thereby disrupting the overall imagineering process. Within the boundary walls and through the gated lodges of the parklands, however, the experience of the picturesque enclave as documented by the travelogue writers and artists was not of domination and constraint imposed by the landlord class upon the connoisseurs, but the opposite: feelings of unrestrained mobility and freedom. Here lies the power of illusion inherent in theme parking, where the necessary form of design domination with its physically embedded aesthetic structure produced by the direct producers was subsumed under the cultural form of how that aesthetic form actually was experienced with its sense of free and unrestrained movement. It was the parks’ constructed topography that connected the embedded design structure to the sense of free spatial movement. As a consequence, the theme park designers found it necessary to distinguish between differing experiences of movement with regard to the body and its eyes, as Crandell suggests in the following:

“In painting, the rise and fall, advance and recess, and convexity and concavity of form has the same effect of creating movement as do hill and dale, foreground and distance, and swelling and sinking, in the landscape. For the spectator in an actual landscape, however, topographic relief does more than affect the eyes; it creates a distinction between eyes and feet and becomes a design principle that mandates that the foot should never travel by the same route as the eye. The eyes can travel quickly, ‘irritated’ by lights and shades, while the feet stroll leisurely over hill and dale.”

In the picturesque landscape, bodily movement was not explicitly determined or directly controlled by physical structures. There was no obvious process of focalization as in the more formal French and Italian gardens. The only exception to this tendency was in the proximity of the ‘big house’, and through wooded areas, where footpaths were constructed. As a consequence, the picturesque stroller was allowed to wander free and unrestrained, and this opportunity for undirected movement was determined by the lack of focalizing straight lines. The dominance of the serpentine design feature had the tendency to encourage the sensation of free, unrestrained bodily movement through this spatial enclave, but eye movements were controlled by the scenic sights provided by the landscape gardener. For example, in Kent’s gardens, the spectator was led from one ‘picture’ to another as “a continued series of new and delightful scenes at every step you take.” The differing physical movement and the differing pace of that movement between the body and the eye allowed the gardener the opportunity to design into the garden a sense of dramatic unfolding as the visual scenes ‘lured’ the body to move through the landscape. However, the visually exciting aesthetic appearance of the ‘scenes’ within the landscape had to be complemented by easy bodily movement through that landscape in order for the stroller to experience a feel-good effect. Any discomfort from any side of this sensory dichotomy would destroy the pleasure of the other.

Theme parking involved complete sensory cocooning from all possible undesirable sensations and for this to happen it had to occur in a controlled environment like picturesque parkland. However, the immediate aesthetic and sensory experiences were usually expressed either in the compositional forms of the picturesque (e.g., beautiful, sublime) or in the conceptual forms of sensory movement (e.g., unrestrained, free) or in both forms of sensory appreciation. When the ‘cocooning’ worked and the aesthetic experience was deemed to be successful, there was a strong temptation to use more allegorical forms of expressions in summarizing the overall experience. These more abstract associational concepts tended to symbolize a moral and spiritual meaning for these picturesque gardens. Concepts such as ‘idyllic’, ‘Arcadian’, ‘Virgilian’, ‘pastoral’, and even ‘utopian’ were appearing in cultural texts summarizing the picturesque experience: “What we are presented with in a Brown park is, apparently, a whole ‘world’. This world is Utopian in concept, offering a kind of perfection to the senses, where every alien or untoward element has been gracefully banished.”

The designed physical structures of the picturesque theme park and the immediate aesthetic categories that mediated and conceptualized the landscape as a ‘feel-good’ experience such as ‘beautiful’, ‘serene’, ‘serpentine’, and so on were appropriated by the allegorical concepts as their ontological conditions of existence. The constructed openness and physically uninterrupted lawns not only evoked feelings of freedom of physical mobility but also more philosophical feelings of political freedom, which could even emerge across the Atlantic:

“This appearance (of uninterrupted openness), however, is the consequence of design and calculated manipulation. The extraordinary appeal of this design in American landscape architecture is surely a result of the fact that the landscape garden’s potential for undirected movement feels like and looks like freedom.”

However, all of these grand allegorical concepts were conditional on the recognition of the aesthetic landscape categories being present in these garden enclaves and never vice-versa. The idea of the landscape garden being a ‘utopian world’ could not emerge unless that particular enclave had met all the aesthetic criteria necessary to fulfill the requirements of the ‘picturesque’ category. It is at this point, where these over-determined idealistic concepts were being applied not only to these spatial enclaves but were also being accepted without criticism, that the picturesque landscape became iconic of the political ideals and aspirations of the landowning class. These ideological categories of the picturesque have moved from the various cultural practices of art, philosophy, and travel writing to become ‘spatialized’ in the design forms of the informal English garden, waiting, like ancient hieroglyphics, to be interpreted by the connoisseur and thereby to emerge again as not just a conceptual expression of an aesthetic experience, but as an ideology reflecting the ideals and social values of the landed elite class. In doing so it provided a meaningless dream of a new ‘world’ beyond the gritty reality of everyday life and, especially, class relationships. Like all theme parks, they were about escape from the physical spaces of mundane reality into a space of idealized nature, and escape from the harsh realities of everyday economic life into an idealized dream world of democracy exclusively for the landowning elite:

“In a more general sense, the landscape garden’s forms were presented as a political challenge to the brash, worldly, and authoritarian attitudes that the English attributed to the axial and geometric French gardens. The English landscape garden was taken to be more natural because it was rooted in a democracy.”

Yet it was only democracy for the few: the ones who controlled the ideological and material production of the picturesque. However, in its own political habitat, the English informal garden may have been accepted as democratic, but such an intellectual flight of fantasy in the context of colonial Ireland came up against a real turbulent political reality, whose inhabitants were ready and willing to disturb the constructed tranquility of the Anglo-Irish landlord’s picturesque gardens. The strength of this particular hegemonic ideology of the picturesque was determined by how it actually became embedded in the physical landscape and how this ideology was continually replicated as these picturesque scenes were reproduced in the paintings/texts of picturesque connoisseurs. The portrayal of a picturesque scene on a landlord’s demesne may have been realistic and authentic of what was physically present to be replicated; the crucial determining factor of the picturesque theme park was that scene was already restructured and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality.

Conclusion: Ending the Tyranny of the Picturesque Theme Park

When the Halls had nearly completed their tour of the picturesque ‘spots’ of Co. Wicklow, they decided to visit one last picturesque location: the ruined monastic city of Glendalough. Unlike the other picturesque locations they visited, however, their attempted picturesque reading of the Glendalough landscape was interrupted by the native Irish guides:

“At Glendalough, guides of all degrees start from beneath the bushes, and from amid the crags—we had almost written, and the lake—and ‘they will do anything in the wide world to serve and oblige yer honours’, except leave you to yourselves.”

These amassing guides, these destroyers ‘of the solemn harmony of the surrounding objects’, were initially paid to stay away from the ‘city’ as the two picturesque connoisseurs toured the ruins by themselves, accompanied only by their picturesque compositional framework. However, the Halls had to promise to hire some of the guides the following morning for a guided tour of the site. This they did. Their guided tour was a non-picturesque interpretation of the landscape. The chosen guides provided an oral interpretation that highlighted the spiritual and symbolic aspects of the landscape mostly associated with St. Kevin’s life. There was no mention of the picturesque qualities, which the Halls had discovered the previous evening. This new oral interpretation of the Irish landscape not only challenged the dominance of the picturesque as a cultural form, but the contestation between the differing landscape interpretations had a class basis to it. The picturesque was a cultural attribute of the landed elite, while the oral interpretation was a crucial ingredient of the local peasant culture. In the spatial area of Glendalough and through the competing perspectives of the Halls and the peasant guides, the landscape of the ruined city became contested. This occurred because Glendalough was not on a landlord’s demesne, but rather was located on old ecclesiastical lands—not a ‘picturesque’ theme park.

The spatial control within the parklands allowed the landlords the conditions to create and continually reproduce the picturesque visibility. When this crucial element of spatial control was lost (i.e., where the picturesque attempted to impose its ideological interpretation beyond the secure boundaries of the parkland and subsequently without the necessary societal force of private property), this hegemonic visuality could and was challenged by the natives and their non-picturesque interpretation of place.

Finally, the theme parks of the picturesque met their own demise with the fall of landlordism in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, some of the old picturesque grounds, and especially their wooded areas, became the drilling and training grounds for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the war of independence. Such an occurrence happened on the picturesque demesne of Dunboy Castle, the residence of the Puxley family on the Bere Peninsula. In a very real sense, the political ‘sublime’ forces of the IRA in scaling the walls of the ‘beautiful’ garden closed the chapter on this particular theme park of the picturesque.

Notes on contributor

Eamonn Slater is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University
of Ireland, Maynooth. He has edited two books with his colleague, Dr Michel Peillon: Encounters with Modern Ireland (1998) and Memories of the Present (2000). He 10 is currently researching Marx’s ideas on ecology and the Irish Famine, car dependency and suburbia in Ireland.

Notes and references

1. Recently there has been a lot discussion among cultural theorists of theme parks and
   the theming of urban America. Most of this work has been concerned with the ‘Disney- fication’ of modern consumption patterns. See Fjellman, S. (1992) Vinyl Leaves: Walt
   Disney and America, Westview Press, Oxford; Gottdiener, M. (2001) The Theming of 20 America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies and Themed Environments, Westview Press, Oxford; Sorkin, M. (1992) Variations on a Theme Park: The American City and the End ofPublic Space, Noonday Press, New York; Wasko, J. (2001) Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, Polity Press, Oxford; Zukin, S. (1993) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Gottdiener comes closest to the idea that theme parks existed before Disney in his work The Theming of America.
2. Duffy, P. (1994) ‘The landscape artist as witness to the changing rural landscape’, in Art into History, eds B. Kennedy & R. Gillespie, Townhouse Press, Dublin; Somerville-Large, P. (1995) The Irish Country House: A Social History, Sinclair- Stevenson, London. According to Duffy (’The landscape artist’, p. 15), the demesne walls of the Irish landed estate had no equivalent in England. Some of these walls were impressive in both length and height. The Coole estate had all of its 600 acres walled in (Somerville-Large, The Irish Country House, p. 136).
3. Woods, C. J. (1992) ‘Review article: Irish travel writings as source material’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 110, pp. 171–183.
4. Hall, S. C. (1853) Handbooks for Ireland: Dublin and Wicklow, Dean & Son, London.
5. Mokyr, J. (1983) Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the IrishEconomy, George Allen & Unwin, London.
6. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 99.
7. Barrel, J. (1972) The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, p. 21.
8. Gombrich, E. R. (1973) The Story of Art, Phaidon Press, London, p. 309.
9. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 100.
10. The dualism of the beautiful and the sublime has a long history of evolution in Aesthet-
    ics (see Le Bris, M. (1981) Romantics and Romanticism, Skira, Geneva, pp. 28–30), but 45 it was not until the 1760s that the first British (and Irish) pictorial representation of
    the sublime was painted. This coincided with the publication of Edmund Burke’s

treatise (Burke, E. (1990 [1757]) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the

Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, Oxford).

11. Stuart, D. C. (1979) Georgian Garden, Robert Hale, London, p. 83.
12. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry, p. 36.
13. Barrel, The Idea of Landscape, p. 6.
14. Bell, D. (1993) ‘Framing nature: First steps into the wilderness for the sociologyof the landscape’, Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, p. 22; Barrel, The Idea of Landscape,p. 6.
15. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 157
16. The Trinity College political economist of the 1840s and 1850s, William NeilsonHancock, argued that legal statutes prevented the tenants from investing in improve- ments on their holdings, such as drainage and tree planting in his work (see Hancock, W.N. (1850) Impediments to the Prosperity of Ireland, Simms & McInture, London). With Terrence McDonough, I argued that Irish rural economy was dominated by a feudal mode of production rather than by the capitalist mode of production in the nineteenth century. Because of the way Ireland was colonised by Britain, the Anglo- Irish landlords were ceded an enormous amount of political and legal power, which allowed them to ‘rackrent’ their tenantry in a feudal way (Slater, E. & McDonough, T. (1994) ‘Bulwark of landlordism and capitalism: The dynamics of feudalism in nineteenth-century Ireland’, Research in Political Economy, vol. 14. pp. 63–118).
17. Reeves-Smith, T. (1997) ‘The natural history of demesnes’, in Nature in Ireland: A Scien- tific and Cultural History, eds J. Foster & H. Chesney, Lilliput Press, Dublin, p. 551.
18. McCullagh, N. & Mulvin, V. (1987) A Lost Tradition: The Nature of Architecture in Ireland, Gandon Press, London, p. 67.
19. Stuart, Georgian Garden, p. 42.
20. McCullagh & Mulvin, A Lost Tradition, p. 67.
21. Stuart, Georgian Garden, p. 42.
22. In 1762, the Duke of Leinster wrote to Capability Brown in England and offered him£1,000 to come to Ireland to create a picturesque garden at his Carton estate, but Brown allegedly refused stating that he had first of all to finish England (see Dooley, T. & Mallaghan, C. (2006) Carton House: An Illustrated History, Costar Associates, Celbridge, p. 58).
23. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 162.
24. Trees had to be planted in specific ‘picturesque’ locations, trimmed and pruned, andthey had to be replaced when damaged. The grass had not only to be cut (by scythes and/or grazing livestock), but also it had to be brushed and swept. Non-picturesque natural entities of the local ecosystem tended to be eliminated in the classical Brown- ian landscape: ‘every irregularity and blemish has to be manicured out of existence.’ A messy line of reeds, brambles, nettles and bushes was never his intention. It was important either to mow or else let the cattle browse right up to the water’s edge (Turner, R. (1985) Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-century English Landscape, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, pp. 81–82).
25. Gallagher, L. (1989) ‘Nature improved and raised by art’, The Shaping of the Ulster Landscape: Ulster Local Studies, vol. 11, p. 34.
26. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 104.
27. Clifford, D. (1962) A History of Garden Design, Faber & Faber, London, p. 173.
28. Bellamy, D. (1986) The ‘Wild’ Boglands: Bellamy’s Ireland, Christopher Helm, London.
29. Somerville, E. & Ross, V. M. (1990) Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, VirgoPress, London, p. 168.

30. MacDonagh, O. (1983) States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780–1980, George Allen & Unwin, London, p. 29.
31. Harley, J. B. (1988) ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in The Iconography of Landscape, eds D. Cosgrove & S. Daniels, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 292.
32. Gallagher, ‘Nature improved by art’, p. 42.
33. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, London, p. 271.
34. Gibbons suggests that the opening up of the picturesque locations of Ireland to the‘modern’ traveller in the 1740s was one of the founding moments of European Romanticism (Gibbons, L. (1996) ‘Topographies of terror: Killarney and the politics of the sublime’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 25, p. 95).
35. Crandell, G. (1993) Nature Pictorialized: ‘The View’ in Landscape History, Johns Hopkins University Press, London, p. 129.
36. O’Kane suggests that there was a prevalence of peasant resentment at the disposses- sion of their ancestral lands and a firm belief that they might be restored to them one day (O’Kane, F. (2004) Landscape Design in Eighteenth-century Ireland, Cork University Press, Cork, p. 173).
37. Reeves-Smith, ‘The natural history of demesnes’, p. 556.
38. In the first fifty years of the eighteenth century, 61 trees and 91 new shrubs wereintroduced into England. Many of these global plant species were re-routed to the colonies including Ireland (Dixon-Hunt, J. (2003) The Picturesque Garden in Europe, Thames & Hudson, London, p. 45).
39. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 130.
40. Archer, K. (1997) ‘The limits to the imagineered city: Sociospatial polarization inOrlando’, Economic Geography, vol. 73, no. 3, p. 334.
41. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 125.
42. Ingram, D. L. (1991) Basic Principles of Landscape Design, University of Florida, CIR536 25Document, Department of Environmental Horticulture, p. 5.
43. Hussey, C. (1967) The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, Cass, London, p. 130.
44. Turner, Capability Brown, p. 78.
45. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 126.
46. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 126.
47. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 127.
48. Slater, E. (1993) ‘Contested terrain: Differing interpretations of Co. Wicklow’s land-scape’, Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, p. 45.
49. Williams, R. A. (1991) The Berehaven Copper Mines, Northern Mine Research Society,Sheffield, p. 179.
50. In the twentieth century, other ‘chapters’ of the picturesque theme park werereopened as backdrops to the new emerging corporate golf courses in Ireland and the movie industry. Ireland’s most famous film, The Quiet Man, was filmed mostly in the picturesque grounds of Ashford Castle, Co. Mayo.

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Abstract: This article surveys an unpublished piece in which Engels examined the ecological conditions of Ireland in a chapter, entitled the “Natural Conditions” in his unfinished History of Ireland. This is the only time that either Marx or Engels analysed in detail the specific ecological structure of a particular social formation. In interpreting Engels’ findings, dialectically, we are able to explicate a dialectical framework that gives us a greater insight into how Engels understands how the dialectics of nature enfold in a particular bio-region and crucially those same organic processes of nature provide the necessary ecological conditions for society to engage in agricultural cultivation.

The geological system of Ireland and its particular sieve-like structure moderates the climatic condition of excessive rainfall so that cultivation can continue. The stony soil system plays a similar function to the limestone bedrock, in that it channels water through it. This piece of investigation by Engels can be seen as a concrete case study into the dynamic metabolising relationships between the diverse organic processes of Nature as they are appropriated by society in agricultural production. The conceptual trajectory of this dialectical analysis is to emphasise the inherent fluidity, mutual interaction and ‘universal connection’ of the forces of nature. This particular work of Engels on Ireland is a significant contribution to our understanding of not only of the dialectics of nature but also the methodology of dialectics.

Marx and Engels make an extraordinary assertion in their German Ideology about how history should be written:

In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history has either been totally disregarded or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard, the real production of life appears as non-historical, while the historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created (Marx and Engels, CW, vol.5, 1976: 55).

I believe Marx and Engels are proposing is that in order to overcome the ‘antithesis of nature and history’ it is necessary to bring in the co-evolution of the ‘relation of man to nature’. And fortunately, within the same work they suggest how to begin such a conceptual endeavour:

‘The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modifications in the course of history through the action of man’1. (Marx and Engels, CW, vol.5, 1976: 31)

Consequently, Engels in his attempt to write his History of Ireland appears to ground his understanding of Ireland’s history in Ireland’s ecological base: He begins his History of Ireland by engaging in an extensive survey of Ireland’s ecological conditions in a twenty-page chapter entitled ‘Natural Conditions’ (Marx, 1971:171-191). This is the only extensive example of Marx or Engels beginning an analysis of ‘real historical’ development of a society by an examination of its ecological conditions. Thus, it provides us with an ideal opportunity to ascertain how Marx and Engels would engage in such a vitally important form of historical analysis.

However, there is a problem with Engel’s lengthy discussion of these natural conditions of Ireland: the dialectic conceptualization of the piece is at a very early stage within the method of dialectical inquiry2. It is at the point where a vast array of empirical facts is presented and the dialectical interconnections of concrete reality are only beginning to appear in text, which is the essential and necessary point to be reached in the dialectical method of inquiry as Engels suggests in the following:

‘We all agree that in every field of science, in the natural as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material forms and the various forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science too the interconnections are not to be built into the facts but to be discovered in them, …’ (Engels, Dialectics of Nature:47).

Therefore, in order to ‘discover’ and make explicit these underlying dialectical interconnections of the ecological ‘facts’ presented, I have divided Engels’ account into distinct sections that emphasise the inherent processual aspects of the dialectical relations between the

1 Marx and Engels identify these natural bases in the previous sentence as “geological, oro-hydrographical, and climate and so on”. (Marx and Engels, CW, vol.5, 1976: 31).

2 Marx suggested that dialectics involved two stages and both linked. The preliminary stage is the method of inquiry and subsequently followed by a method of presentation.

‘given fact’s. This allows me to highlight the inherent sense of movement within and between these Irish natural conditions as processes and, it enables me to follow the logical sequence in which these natural conditions are dealt with by Engels – rock structure, soil, climatic conditions, naturally occurring vegetation and finally cultivated crops. This sequence appears to follow a logical hierarchical structure in its’ unfolding. Engel’s indicates this to us where he says:

The earth’s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and human beings themselves have definitely changed… (Engels, 1986: 231).

The categorization of these ecological aspects is determined by a logical order where the previous unfolded process provides the necessary preconditions for the emergence of other following on processes which culminate in the final arrival at societal endeavours in the process of cultivation, i.e., ‘human beings themselves’. This is the reason why Engels provided this ecological chapter at the beginning of his book. He did so to explicate the natural (ecological) conditions of the Irish social formation before beginning his analysis of how Irish society and its various social processes metabolize with its organic processes of Nature over time. Accordingly, we begin as Engels did with the natural processes rather than the social processes, specifically, with the physical base of Ireland’s ‘earth surface’ – its geological structure.

Ireland’s geological system

In his chapter entitled ‘Natural Conditions’, Engels adopts an overall conceptual trajectory that is concerned with how these ecological conditions function for agricultural production, including its geological structure. Engels himself was very much aware of the significance of the geological rock structure for soil formation3 and plant growth. Thus, he began his analysis of the Irish ecological conditions by looking at the geological formation of Ireland in which the Carboniferous phase appears to be the determinant period in the geological development of Ireland4:

To understand the nature of the soil of present-day Ireland we have to return to the distance epoch when the so-called Carboniferous System was formed (Engels, 1971:172).

In geological terms Ireland is shaped like a saucer with a central plain encircled by a mountain chain which hugs its coastal perimeter. This plain, ‘the foundation of the whole of Ireland consists of the massive bed of limestone’ was formed during the Carboniferous period. Subsequently, it was then covered mostly with drift left behind by the Ice Age. During this Ice Age, most of Ireland was submerged by the sea except for the mountain tops. And, as the

3 Engels in letter to Marx and in discussing Tremaux:

That the geological structure of the soil is closely related to the ‘soil’ in which everything grows is an old idea, likewise that this soil which is able to support vegetation influences the flora and fauna that subsist on it. It is also true that this influence has as yet been scarcely examined at all (Engels to Marx 5th October, 1866 – MECW Vol. 42, 1987: 322).

4 Engels stated in a footnote ‘Unless stated all the geological data given here is from J. Beete Jukes, The Student’s Manual of Geology, New Edition, Edinburgh, 1862. Jukes was the local superior during the geological survey of Ireland and therefore the prime authority on this territory, which he treats in special detail. (Engels:172).

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submersion slowly proceeded, drift was subsequently deposited. This drift was/is a complex combination of diverse rock components as Engels indicates in the following:

Pieces of rock eroded from the mountain islands and fine fragments of rock scraped away by the glaciers as they pushed their way slowly and powerfully through the valleys – earth, sand, gravel, stones, rocks, worn smooth within the ice but sharp-edged above it – all this was carried out to sea and gradually deposited on the sea-bed by icebergs which were detaching themselves from the shore. The layer formed in this way varies according to circumstances and contains loam (originating from argillaceous slate), sand (originating from quartz and granite), limestone gravel (derived from limestone formations), marl (where finely-crumbled limestone mixes with loam) or mixtures of all these components; but it always contains a mass of stones of all sizes, sometimes rounded, sometimes sharp, ranging up to colossal erratic boulders….During the subsequent re-emergence of the land from the sea, this newly- formed surface was given roughly its present structure. (Engels, 1971:175/6).

This enormous accumulation of rock and rock particles is the mineral basis for formation of the soil structure. But the dominant rock remaining within this geological process is limestone:

The variety of rocks, whose decomposition contributed and is still contributing to this soil, provides it with a corresponding variety of the mineral elements required for vegetable life, and if one of these, say lime, is greatly lacking in the soil, plenty of pieces of limestone of all sizes are to be found everywhere-quite apart from the underlying limestone bed-so it can be added quite easily (Engels, 1971:177).

In this, Engels identifies a crucial aspect of the composition of the soil: He clearly states that the minerals which emerge from the underlying varieties of the bedrock subsequently become vital components of the natural fertility of the soil and the ‘vegetable life’ that are dependent on these ‘mineral elements’. However, there is one species of mineral that is missing from the Irish geological strata and that is coal. Engels highlights the significance of this loss of energy resource for Ireland:

It is obvious that Ireland’s misfortune is of ancient origin; it begins directly after the carboniferous strata were deposited. A country whose coals deposits are eroded, placed near a larger country, rich in coal, is condemned by nature to remain for a long time the farming country for the larger country when the latter is industrialised. That sentence, pronounced millions of years ago, was carried out in this century. We shall see later, moreover, how the English assisted nature by crushing almost every seed of Irish industry as soon as it appeared (Engels, 1971:174).

In this dramatic demonstration of the explanatory power of dialectics, Engels proposed that the geological process has metabolised with the colonial process to leave Ireland deindustrialised – a mere agricultural region feeding Britain.

What is interesting about how Engels unfolds his analysis of the geological system is that his conceptual trajectory is concerned with understanding how diverse rock forms are the material and mineral basis of the Irish soil system i.e. he indicates how the geological process is subsumed under the soil system where it provides the essential physical structure and mineral contents of the soil.

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The soil system5

Engels begins his discussion of the nature of the Irish soil by stating the following:

From an agricultural point of view, Ireland’s soil is almost entirely formed from the drift of the Ice Age, which here, thanks to its slate and limestone origin is …extremely fertile, light loam (Engels, 1971:177).

So, Ireland’s soil is formed from the debris of rocks dropped by the moving glaciers over the lowlands of Ireland. But a large proportion of these lowlands are bog: Where the necessary minerals for normal vegetation growth had been leached out of land then peat bog develops instead of soil (Bellamy, 1986). Even when vital mineral elements are perceived to be missing from the soil, they can be ‘sourced’ near-by and added in ‘quite easily’. The implication of thislatter human intervention is immense. ‘Fertility’ – productive fertility – appears to be relative to the type of ‘vegetable life’ required by society. In this particular case Engels is referring to peat bog – a ‘vegetable life’ (ecosystem) which has very limited usage for society’s agricultural needs, except for turf production and extensive grazing at certain dry periods of the year (Bellamy, 1986). However, this peat bog ecosystem and its deficient ‘natural fertility’ can be ‘repaired’ by digging out from its underlying mostly marl (finely-crumbled limestone mixed with loam) base and adding this to the peat to make a soil suitable for agricultural production. But as Engels states, this type of soil reclamation was rarely done under agricultural production in the 1860s:

Yet, the peat bogs of Ireland are by no means hopelessly lost to agriculture; on the contrary, in time we shall see what rich fruits some of these, and the two million hectares of the “indifferent land” contemptuously mentioned by Lavergne, can produce given correct management (Engels,1871:183).

Here, we uncover why Engels discusses Ireland’s ‘natural conditions’: He apparently does so for the purpose of assessing the potential agricultural capabilities of the soil system and how those capabilities are constrained initially by deficient natural conditions e.g. peat bogs and then crucially by ‘the barbaric manner in which the peasants cultivated it’ (Engels quoting Arthur Young, 1871:177). The apparent trajectory of Engel’s structure of conceptualization is to move the analysis from the physical contents of the natural conditions towards the social form in which these conditions of fertility operate under agricultural production.

With regard to the natural contents of the Irish soil system, they are the foundational components of the overall structure of the Irish ecosystem and are in general considered to offer natural fertility because they produce soil that falls between the infertile extremities of the range of soil composition types:

5 In a letter to Marx, Engels stated the following “Similarly, Darwin and others have never failed to appreciate the effect of soil, and if they did not especially emphasise it, this was because they had no notion of how the soil exerts its influence – other than that fertility has a favourable and infertility an unfavourable effect” (Engels to Marx 5th October, 1866 – MECW Vol. 42, :322).

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We see therefore that all authorities agree that Ireland’s soil contains all the elements of fertility to an extraordinary degree. This, not only in its chemical ingredients but also in its structure. The two extremes of heavy impenetrable clay, completely impermeable, and loose sand, completely permeable, do not occur (Engels, 1971:182).

Consequently, the natural fertility of the Irish soil surpasses that of Britain. as Engels quotes from Arthur Young:

Natural fertility, acre for acre over the two kingdoms, is certainly in favour of Ireland’ (Young, vol.2, part11, p.3).

And also, Engels quotes the French agronomist de Lavergne on the superior quality of the Irish soil in comparison to the English soil “Even the English admit that Ireland, in point of soil, is superior to England”6 . But the soil system and the rock substructure are not in themselves the exclusive determinants of the natural and cultivated ecosystems of Ireland. Instead, they interact with climatic conditions to affect outcomes at this level.

The climate system

Engels suggests that the dominant determinant of the climate of Ireland is its position with regard to the Gulf Stream (Engels, 1971:184). The prevailing south-westerly winds coming off the Atlantic Gulf Stream provides warmth in winter, making weather conditions at that time mild and practically frost free, and in summer, the south-westerly winds tend to provide cool temperatures:

… there are seldom more than two or three consecutive dry days in summer; and in late autumn it is fine again. Very dry summers are rare and dearth never occurs because of draught but mostly because of too much rain. It seldom snows on the plains, so cattle remain in the open all of the year-round (Engels, 1971:186).

In summarizing these climatic conditions Engels compares them to those of London:

… the temperatures are more even, the winters milder and the summers cooler than in London, while on the other hand the air is damper. (Engels, 1971: 186).

And it is so damp that salt, sugar or flour left out in an unheated room will soak the dampness out of the air (Engels, 1971:186/7). However, it is not the amount of rain that falls which is important, but “how and when it falls” (Engels, 1971:185). The “how and when” of the Irish

6 Marx wrote the following to Engels: P.S. In an article in The Fortnightly Review (August issue) on “Our Uncultivated Lands”, I found the following on the soil in Ireland:

‘That her soil is fertile is proved upon the testimony etc. etc. and M. De Laveleye: the latter gentleman says etc. etc (p.204)’

Since the English regard Laveleye as a great authority on agronomy because his books on Belgian and Italian agriculture, the passage may be of use to you (Marx to Engels, 10th August, 1870, MECW, Letters, vol. 44:.40).

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rainfall is apparently determined by ‘the fresh sea-breezes’ of the Atlantic which creates a condition of volatility in comparison to the drabness of the English weather system. Engels contrasts these volatile tendencies of the Irish climate with the English one:

In spite of this the Irish climate is decidedly pleasanter than the English. The leaden sky which often causes days of continual drizzle in England is mostly replaced in Ireland by a continental April sky; the fresh sea-breezes bring on clouds quickly and unexpectedly, but drive them past equally quickly, if they do not come down immediately in sharp showers. The weather, like the inhabitants, has a more acute character, it moves in sharper, more sudden contrasts; …. (Engels, 1971: 184).

As with his analysis of the soil system, Engels explicitly states that the conceptual trajectory of his examination of the Irish climatic system allows him to assess its impact on agriculture7 (Engels, 1871:185). To do this he used many sources, including the Scottish agronomist – James Caird – sent over by Peel to investigate the state of Irish agriculture during the Famine. Engels quotes Caird (1849) on how the excessive humidity of Ireland encourages vegetation growth:

The humidity of the climate causes a very constant vegetation, which has both advantages and disadvantages. It is favourable for grass and green crops but renders it necessary to employ very vigorous and preserving efforts to extirpate weeds’ (Engels, 1971:181).

This identified ‘disadvantage’ is not an aspect of the natural propensity of the climatic dampness to be a catalyst to vegetation growth. Rather, it refers to how that tendency is appropriated for agricultural production. Humidity can impact differently on differing species of plants, including ‘domesticated’ plant ecosystems such as grains. Within the grain ‘family’ itself, Engels uses Wakefield’s research on Irish climate to highlight the difference between its impacts on corn in general and oats in particular:

…, but nowhere does he state that it provides a serious obstacle to the cultivation of corn (Engels, 1871:188).

The Irish climate is more suited for the production of oats because ‘oats can take a considerable amount of rain’ (Engels, 1971:189). In general, the excessive humidity of the Irish climate encourages grass growth:

Arthur Young considers that Ireland is considerably damper than England; this is the cause of the amazing grass-bearing qualities of the soil (Engels, 1971:185).

However, the humidity of the climate is just one moment among many that determines the natural fertility of the soil. What appears to be crucial in Engel’s unfolding of Ireland’s natural conditions are how these diverse natural processes combine together to produce the unique fertility conditions of Ireland.

‘Rainy’ climate metabolising with the stony soil and porous bedrock

However, it is not just the presence of a mild climatic system and a good soil system, which creates the conditions of natural fertility, but it is how they are metabolised under specific

7 Engels stated that the “climate only concerns us here insofar as it is important for agriculture” (Engels, 1971:185)

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Irish conditions. Engels is rightly aware of this crucial metabolising relationship in referring to Young’s (Engels, 1971:184) discussion of the relationship between heavy rainfall and the soil structure in Ireland:

At the same time, however, he points out that the soil in Ireland counteracts this dampness of the climate. It is generally stony, and for this reason lets the water through more easily (Engels, 1971:185).

Dampness in this context refers to rainfall and how the physical structure of the soil, determined in part by its stony composition allows the excess water from the heavy rainfall to pass through without water logging. The permeable nature of the soil allows sufficient water to metabolize with the mineral composition of the soil without leaching out the nutrients that maintain natural fertility. Engels uses Young’s comparison of this inherent permeable condition of the Irish soil- which creates its conditions of natural fertility – with the impermeable condition of the English clay soil:

If as much rain fell upon the clays of England (a soil very rarely met with in Ireland, and never without much stone) falls upon the rocks of her sister-island, those lands could not be cultivated. But the rocks clothed with verdure; – those of limestone with only a thin covering of mold, have the softest and the most beautiful turf imaginable (Vol.2, Part11: 3-4).

However, it is not just the permeability of the stony soil structure in itself, which allows for the ‘growth of this most beautiful turf imaginable’ but also the limestone bedrock, which the Irish soil lays upon:

[….] The limestone is known to be full of cracks and fissures which let excess water through quickly (Engels, 1971:185).

As we have already uncovered the Irish climate according to Arthur Young “is the cause of the amazing grass-bearing qualities of the soil” (Engels, 1971: 185), but this is not sufficient in itself as it needs to ‘metabolize’ with the permeable structures of the soil and its limestone bedrock. Although this particular metabolic relationship appears to intensify the growth of grass, it does not hinder the growth of corn:

…., nowhere does he (Wakefield) state that it (climate) provides a serious obstacle to the cultivation of corn. In fact, he finds, as we shall see, that the losses incurred during the wet harvest times are due to entirely different causes, and states so quite explicitly (Engels, 1871:188) (my inclusion in brackets)

Wakefield even identifies three processes that allow Ireland to produce not just a sufficient crop of corn but a yield which he describes as a ‘super-abundance’:

The soil of Ireland is so fertile, and the climate so favourable, under a proper system of agriculture, it will produce not only a sufficiency of corn for its own use, but a superabundance which may be ready at all times to relieve England when she may stand in need of assistance (vol. 2, p.61) (Engels,1971:188).

Of these three processes that metabolize with each other to produce a corn crop of superabundance, the two natural processes of soil and climate we have unfolded, the one

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remaining to be uncovered is the ‘system of agriculture’. It should be noted in Wakefield’s account that the ‘raison d’être’ for this Irish superabundance was to feed England.

Engels documents how differing types of natural fertility are more naturally proficient in producing particular agricultural products than others. The typology of the difference in fertility propensities is itself determined by how the diverse natural processes have metabolised with each other within a particular spatial enclave. Thus the ‘natural fertility’ of a region makes it more or less suited to a particular type of agricultural production Where an agricultural region has a naturally endowed suitability to produce a particular product, there is less need for human intervention to boost fertility artificially. Engels goes through the regions of Ireland assessing their natural productivity for agricultural production. We have already outlined Engel’s extensive discussion of the Irish peat bogs of the central plain and how they are really only suited for rough grazing of sheep and cattle. Beyond the peat bogs Engels continues to assess other regions of Ireland with regard to their natural productivity. For example, he refers to Arthur Young’s summation of the natural productiveness of North Cork, Tipperary and Roscommon:

Friable, sandy loams, dry but fertile, are very common, and they form the best soils in the Kingdom, for tillage and sheep (Engels, 1971:178).

It is interesting to note that differing soil compositions can have differing combinations of product mixes. Again, Young on County Limerick:

…., it is the richest soil I ever saw, and such as is applicable to every purpose you can wish; it will fat the largest bullock, and at the same time do equally well for sheep, for tillage, for turnips, for wheat, for beans, and in a word, for every crop…. (Engels,1871:178).

Here in Limerick, and contrasting with the previously mentioned region where tillage and sheep reigned, the soil is suited for tillage and sheep but, also for cattle production. This has to do with not only differing soil types but also with how they metabolize with the climatic process. Also, the depth of the physical structure of the soil can have a consequence for how the natural productivity can support a particular agricultural activity and not others. In the following account of an area, low soil depth eliminates tillage production, which is generally a feature of loam soil, but here, the conditions determined by the processes of natural fertility allow only for the pasturing of sheep:

If a thinnish layer of heavy loam lies directly on limestone, the land is not suited to tillage and bears only a miserable crop of grain, but it makes excellent sheep-pastures (Engels, 1971:180).

But, it should also be noted that these processes that determine natural fertility can also have a seasonal aspect to them. For example, a turlough can be a lake in winter time and a dry lush pasture location in summer:

Dr Beaufort states that there occur in the west, particularly in Mayo, many turloughs – shallow depressions of different sizes, which fill with water in the winter, although not visibly connected with streams of rivers. In the summer this drains away through underground fissures in the limestone, leaving luxurious firm grazing-ground (Engels, 1971:180).

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But all of these ‘natural conditions’ were essentially moments of metabolised natural processes, which today would be known as an ecosystem. This natural ecosystem was in turn embedded in social processes when society intervened in its pursuit of agricultural products.

The thwarting of the natural fertility of the Irish soil by the social process of the British colonial market

Engels summarises the main natural tendencies of the metabolised soil to produce agricultural products:

If one looks at the matter impartially and without being misled by the cries of the interested parties, …….., one finds that Ireland like all other places, has some parts which because of the soil and climate are more suited to cattle-rearing, and others to tillage, and still others – the vast majority – which are suited for both (Engels, 1971:190).

This quotation succinctly captures the thrust of Engel’s analysis of the metabolised natural processes and how they provide diverse productive conditions for agricultural production. It is crucial that we be aware of the regional diversity of these natural fertility capabilities as their subsumption under particular social forms of production will have a tendency to thwart their natural productive tendencies. For example, an increasing market demand for a particular agricultural product such as cattle, which in the market context would take on the social form of a commodity, would have a tendency to push cattle production beyond its natural productive enclaves into ‘naturally’ endowed tillage areas. Rising prices for cattle products against tillage commodity prices would encourage producers to swing away from tillage production and the natural productive capabilities embedded in that bio-region, so that, these fertility moments would now have to metabolize with the newly imposed product and its necessary ecological requirements. In this situation, the imposed agricultural regime would have more discordant elements within its process of metabolization than the previous regime8. But crucially the subsumption of agricultural terrains with diverse natural productive capabilities under a specific commodity regime will have a tendency to ‘homogenize’ the fertility contents of the ecosystems subsumed. Human intervention will attempt to upgrade the naturally endowed fertility system – the natural ecosystem – to a level that is determined by the productive requirements of the commodity been produced9. Therefore, in any agricultural region or country, one type of

8 As Marx stated:

Finally, fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time. A piece of land may be very fertile for corn growing, and yet the market price may induce the cultivator to turn it into an artificial pastureland and thus render it infertile (Marx and Engels, 1975, CW, 6, 204).

9 In the following Marx suggests that the capital investment in ‘so-called permanent improvements’ appears to be attempting to construct a uniform condition of fertility by overcoming natural deficiencies (or obstacles) that are present either on the land surface or beneath within the soil structure itself:

…. – nearly all amount to giving a particular piece of land in a certain limited locality such properties as are naturally possessed by some other piece of land elsewhere sometimes quite nearby. One piece of land is naturally level, another has to be levelled, one possesses natural drainage, another requires artificial drainage, one is endowed by Nature with a deep layer of top soil, another needs artificial deepening, one clay soil is naturally mixed with the proper amount of sand, another has to be treated to obtain this

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agricultural ecosystem and its appropriate commodity regime will be dominant in land cover dimensions over others as determined by organic sustainability and market forces. But such a position of dominance does not imply that it should spatially invade and metabolically subsume the other agricultural ecosystems that coexist within a particular locality or region. Engels demonstrates his awareness of the dangers in artificially ‘homogenizing’ natural productive capabilities beyond their naturally endowed spatial enclaves in the following:

Compared with England, Ireland is more suited to cattle-rearing on the whole; but if England is compared with France, she too is more suited to cattle-rearing. Are we to conclude that the whole of England should be transformed into cattle pastures, (Engels, 1971:190).

These agroecosystems (the combination of the social forms of agricultural products with the natural contents of the local ecosystems) are not just ecosystems as they also include labour processes in which a class of direct producers produce within. Consequently, a change from one agroecosystem to another would also entail a change in labour input. Engels appears to have this in mind in suggesting that England because of its more natural propensity for grass growth in comparison to France would become a cattle pasture, but for this to happen the resident agricultural population who were employed in tillage operations would have to be cleared off the land:

….and the whole agricultural population be sent into the factory towns of America – except for a few herdsmen – to make room for cattle, which are to be exported to France in exchange for silk and wine? (Engels, 1971:190).

In proposing this strategy of clearing rural England of people for cattle, Engels is not only emphasising the bizarreness of such a proposal but also the idea that it could subsume all the other naturally occurring fertility enclaves that are conductive to producing non-cattle products. But in a dramatic conceptual move, Engels declares that this specific strategy was the one adopted by the Irish landlords and British bourgeois with regard to transforming Ireland into a cattle pasture and he teases out the implications of this proposal for the Irish people – their extermination:

But that is exactly what the Irish landlords who want to put up the rents and the English bourgeois who want to decrease wages demand for Ireland: Goldwin Smith has said so plainly enough. And yet the social revolution inherent in the transformation from tillage to cattle-rearing would be far greater in Ireland than in England. In England, where large scale agriculture and where agricultural labourers have already been replaced by machinery to a large extent, it would mean the transplantation of at most one million; in Ireland, where small and even cottage- farming prevails, it would mean the transplantation of four million: the extermination of the Irish people (Engels, 1971:190).

There is in this ‘social revolution’ many dimensions of the British colonial project in Ireland. But, it also highlights how the elites of both islands could combine their differing trajectories of colonial subsumption under a shared strategy of changing the productive conditions of Ireland.

proportion; one meadow is naturally irrigated or covered with layers of silt, another requires labour to obtain this condition, or, in the language of bourgeois economics, it requires capital (Marx, 1981, 745/6).

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Firstly, the demand for a product change in the case of colonial Ireland meant the clearance of surplus Irish direct producers off the land to make room for livestock. Secondly, this colonial strategy of land clearances was conceptualised by Marx as ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’ which he proposed as the dominant relationship of the post-Famine period, where the economy was determined by its colonial form. Finally, the changing product demands by the colonising core constrained Ireland to be a mere supplier of agricultural commodities and thus spatially Ireland became an agricultural region of Great Britain10.

“Cultivating” Irish Climate as an ideological buttress for the social process of British colonialism

Engels begins the final section of his chapter with a curious assertion:

It can be seen that even the facts of nature become points of national controversy between England and Ireland. It can also be seen, however, how public opinion of the ruling class in England – and it is only this that is generally known (191) on the Continent – changes with the fashion and in its own interests. Today England needs grain quickly and dependably – Ireland is just perfect for wheat-growing. Tomorrow England needs meat – Ireland is only fit for cattle pastures. (Engels, 1971:190/1).

Here Engels appears to be exploring another dimension of Ireland’s natural conditions where the ‘facts of nature’ play a crucial ideological role in the relationship between colonising England and colonised Ireland. The ideological function of these obviously one-sided interpretations of the complex concrete reality of the cultivation practices in Ireland is to convince a public (both domestic and foreign) of the actions that the colonial regime either has taken or is just about to take with regard to guaranteeing that Irish agriculture provides a secure food supply to the core irrespective of the damage that it inflicts on the Irish producers. The changing colonial food requirements of Britain impose market pressures on the Irish peasantry to switch their production from grain to livestock. But this pressure becomes intensified when the initial agroecosystem collapses as its natural contents ruptures. This is discussed by Engels with regard to a case of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in Cheshire and the potato blight in Ireland. In addition, such a rupture-like occurrence apparently prompts the various ideologues to advocate a necessary product transformation within the agricultural sphere of production whether it is in Cheshire or Ireland:

….; Cheshire carried on mainly cattle-rearing and dairy farming until the last epidemic of cattle- plague, but since most of the cattle perished the climate suddenly became quite admirably suited for wheat-growing. If there had been an epidemic of cattle-plague in Ireland, causing devastation similar to that of Cheshire, instead of preaching that Ireland’s natural occupation is cattle-raising, they would point to the place in Wakefield which says that Ireland is destined to be England’s granary (Engels, 1971:190).

The tragic difference between these two natural ruptures in their respective agroecosystems is that Cheshire lost a food commodity while Ireland lost its immediate food subsistence and two

10Marx stated it in the following way – “But Ireland is at present only an agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.” (Marx, 1971:105).

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million producers of that food through death and emigration. But by locating climate as the sole exclusive determinant of what grows ‘naturally’ in Cheshire or in Ireland, the various accounts that use this conceptual strategy are not only ignoring the other moments of the natural process, but even more crucially, they ignore the social process embedded in cultivation. Accordingly, they are ideologically isolating the natural from the social. As a consequence of such conceptual one-sidedness, isolated and independently determined nature does not have a societal input. Instead, the apparent self-regulating form of the climate appears to be immutable, obeying unalterable ‘God-like’ laws whose evolutionary logic can only be accepted. Thus, the product transformation in the cases of Cheshire and Ireland are perceived to be determined by Nature alone. Marx in Capital reproduces a similar argument as the one made by Engels in the above:

Having praised the fruitfulness of the Irish soil between 1815 and 1846, and proclaimed it loudly as destined for the cultivation of wheat by nature alone, English agronomists, economists and politicians suddenly discovered that it was good for nothing but to produce forage (grass pasture) (Marx,1976:115).

The ‘social revolution’ of population change inherent in this apparently technical ‘transformation from tillage to pasture’ remains hidden because the conceptual framework of naturalism (which Marx is making fun of) evokes the natural forms of the agroecosystem while simultaneously evading the social determinants of this enforced movement of people off the land. Blaming the natural exonerates the social!

This policy of advocating a switch in agroecosystems and its inherent but hidden social revolution in the necessary decline in peasant population is essentially another aspect of British colonial domination of Ireland as Engels suggests in the following:

From Mela to Goldwin Smith11 and up to the present day, how often has this assertion been repeated – since 1846, especially by a noisy chorus of Irish landowners – that Ireland is condemned by her climate to provide not Irishmen with bread but English men with meat and butter, and that the destiny of the Irish people is, therefore, to be brought over the ocean to make room in Ireland for cows and sheep! (Engels, 1971:185).

Conclusion

The naturalism of the above arguments is, as pointed out by Engels and Marx, a one- sided account of a many-sided reality12 , which should have included an analysis of both the

11 Engels stated the following in footnote: Goldwin Smith, Irish History and Irish Character, Oxford and London, 1861. – What is more than amazing in this work, which, under the mask of “objectivity”, justifies English policy in Ireland, the ignorance of the professor of history, or the hypocrisy of the liberal bourgeois? We shall touch on both again later.

12 In the following quotation from 1842, Marx is suggesting how we attempt to make sense of the world – a world that is an ‘unorganised mass’ whose contents are in a constant state of flux and movement. To this ‘manifold diversity of the world’, we tend to make one-sided interpretations:

…for one-sidedness can extract the particular from the unorganised mass of the whole and give it shape…By confining each of the contents of the world in a stable definiteness and as it were solidifying the fluid essence of

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natural and the social processes metabolised. The polemical attack by Marx and Engels against the absurdity of Nature alone determining product cultivation is a critique of the specific colonial apologist’s accounts of the Irish situation but it could also be seen as a critique of bourgeois science in general. In the following, Engels highlights this trend within the natural sciences of perceiving the organic processes of Nature as detached and isolated objects:

The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and organic objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms – these were the fundamental conditions of gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature which have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of investigation has also left us with a legacy of the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things, and therefore not in motion but in their repose, not as essentially changing, but as fixed constants; not in their life, but in their death (Engels, 2015, Duhring: Introduction) (my emphasis).

The non-dialectical orientation of the natural sciences occurs because they are embedded in understanding of the entities of concrete reality at the level of discrete surface appearances – detached and isolated13. Consequently, they have an inherent tendency to eclipse not only the complex interconnections of reality but also, they tend to fail to recognise that these concrete entities are in fact manifest moments of underlying processes14.

Accordingly, these non-dialectical accounts cannot conceptualise the causal links between differing entities of the real world, even such ones as nature and society. The reason for this fatal flaw is that they perceive concrete reality as being made up as thing-like substances, permanent in their essential structure, and not as Engels maintains that [t]he whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from the grains of sands to suns…. has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change’ (Engels, 1986: 30/31).

the content, understanding brings out the manifold diversity of the world, for the world would not be many- sided without the many one-sidedness’s’ (Marx, Debates on the Thefts of Wood, MECW, vol.1, 1975)

This ontological distinction being highlighted here by Marx is that between the ‘unorganised mass of the whole’ with its ‘fluid essence of the content’, in short – the real world, and the ‘one-sidedness’ of our ‘understanding’ of it, as we ‘confine’ the ‘contents’ of the world in our interpretation.

13 And according to Marx this includes the so-called ‘scientists’ of political economy:

Here it will be shown how the philistines’ and vulgar economists’ manner of conceiving things arises, namely, because the only thing that is ever reflected in their minds is the immediate form of appearances of relations, and not in their inner connections. Incidentally, if the latter was the case, we surely have no need of science at all. (Marx to Engels 27 June 1867, MECW, vol.22, 1985).

14 Ilyenkov argued that Marx perceived any individual entity as essentially a moment within a process:

That means that any individual object, thing, phenomenon, or fact is given a certain concrete form of its existence by the concrete process in the movement of which it happens to be involved; any individual object owes any concrete form of existence to the concrete historically established system of things within which it emerged and of which it forms a part, rather than to itself, its own self-contained individual nature (Ilyenkov, 1982: 118).

  

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What can be gleamed from our survey of Engel’s work on Ireland is that to explore the ecological base of a social formation involves unravelling a maze of metabolising processes, both natural and societal, and how those processes penetrate with each other. With regard to the organic processes of nature, any one of its processes cannot be investigated independently of the others. The excessive rainy Irish climate makes no sense in itself but only how it relates to the other organic processes of nature. It cannot be conceptually grasped separate from the other natural processes within the Irish organic totality. Also, all of these organic processes provide a diverse range of functions simultaneously for the overall reproduction of this earthy organic totality. For example, the geological rock process is not only the physical base of Nature’s organic processes but also it is the continuing source of the physical components of the soil, especially the nutrients/minerals. With regard to Ireland, the particular sieve-like structure of its geological base modifies the climatic condition of heavy rainfall so that cultivation can continue. The stony soil plays a similar function to the limestone bedrock, in that it channels water through it. However, the most revealing insight is the crucial dynamic ‘engine’ of the whole metabolising system is the climate, even the excessive damp climate of Ireland.

It is only when we have completed our analysis of the ecological conditions of a particular social formation and unearthed its complex matrix of metabolising organic processes that we can begin to investigate how the social forms of cultivation impact on the organic processes of the soil. In Engel’s presentation of Ireland’s ecological conditions of existence, the apparent dominant social form, which dominated the overall structure of Irish organic totality, was that of colonialism. However, Engels only touched upon this subject matter briefly. In fact, Engels fleetingly locates three discrete moments of the colonisation process15, which he identified as the deindustrialisation of Ireland by British acts of intervention, a constantly manipulated market system geared towards supplying changing British demands for agricultural goods, and finally the enforced emigration of the rural population to make way for livestock production. As a consequence, the dialectical analysis of this article provides us with only an adequate conceptual insight into the ‘workings’ of the organic world of Nature prior to their appropriation within social forms of cultivation. However, this is a necessary pre-condition for the latter form of investigation.

Unlike the social forms of production, which Marx assessed against the highest and most developed social form in evolutionary terms, i.e. capitalism, the understanding of the development of the natural process appears to be evaluated from its pure unadulterated form – uncontaminated by human contact – an organic ecosystem. Its development is subsequently tracked by how it is increasingly penetrated by social processes. In our survey of Engels’ work on the Irish soil system we unfolded the sequential levels in which increasingly more complex social forms ‘encase’ the natural contents of the Irish ecosystems adapted to agricultural production. In order to highlight the significance of Engel’s conceptual procedure I summarise this necessary

15 But this analysis of the colonial form is very rudimentary in comparison to Marx and Engels work elsewhere, where they suggest that colonialism is a complex social process which penetrates all aspects of the Irish organic totality including crucially the soil structure (Slater and McDonough, 2008, Slater, 2013).

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dialectical movement by using the modern concepts of ecosystem and agroecosystem to help the contemporary reader in the following:

Engel’s conceptual procedure and its enfolding levels of determination

1. Ecosystem – includes all of the dialectics of nature centred on the soil system and especially climate, which is the dominant determinant of the overall organic process of Nature. These organic processes – the geological structure, the soil process and the climate system constantly metabolise with each other which subsequently become characterised by their dialectical tendencies of inherent fluidity, mutual interaction and ‘universal connection’.

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2. Agroecosystem – a simple abstract concept which allows us to express how the organic ecosystems of Nature become embedded in agricultural production, and crucially where the bio- aspects of this metabolised process retain their dominance over society’s cultivation practices. In short, the concept of agroecosystem is an idealised representation of sustainable agricultural production, without a specific social form16. It is at this level of unfolding that Engels was able to identify the naturally endowed fertility enclaves (bio-regions) through-out Ireland with regard to the production of particular crops or livestock or both without having to account for the impact of the social forms of cultivation.

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3. Commoditized agroecosystem – the bio- agroecosystem as expressed in the previous level becomes concretized with the emergence of a metabolizing relationship between an organic producing agroecosystem and the social process of a market economy. As a result, the bio- dominance of the idealized agroecosystem becomes subverted by the social form of commodity production and its inherent changing demands of its market. What is cultivated and how it is cultivated becomes increasingly determined by profit rather than the innate bio-sustainability of the agroecosystem.

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4. Colonial Commoditized agroecosystem – the dominant determinant moves from a free market system situation in which agricultural commodities circulates away from their fields of production to a situation, where the colonising core economy uses its power (both economic and political) to distort the operation of the market within the colonised economy. In losing, its market autonomy Ireland accordingly becomes a mere agricultural region of Britain (Marx, 1971: 132).

16 As part of Marx’s method of exposition, he would isolate a particular level of analysis in order to explicate the determinants within the level chosen to work upon as he did with regard to the labour process:

We shall therefore, in the first place, have to consider the labour process independently of any specific social formation (Marx, 1976 :283).

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The above conceptual movement of Engels has only concerned itself with the circulation process, especially at the concrete level of the market. The production process and in particular the cultivation process has been left out, which needs to be tackled in order to take in the full extent of how colonialism penetrates a colonial social formation. However, what we do have from our examination of Engel’s exposition of Ireland’s ‘Natural Conditions’ is a methodology – a dialectical methodology, which has emphasized for us how the organic processes are in a constant state of metabolizing with each other. It is only dialectics, the science of inter- connections (Engels, 1986), that can adequately grasp the dialectics of nature of Ireland and beyond:

In nature, nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things (Engels, 1986: 178).

Although the natural scientists are unable to see a dialectical world as Marx and Engels did, they – Marx and Engels have left us with a dialectical “method for this investigation” (Engels to Werner Sombart, 1895). Engels work on Ireland in particular is a crucial part of this legacy and especially with regard to explicating the dialectics of Nature. The natural scientist’s misinterpretation of reality has cost us dearly and is going to cost us more. In order to turn this about we need to reinterpret the world in order to change it and to do this we need to become scientists of the natural and the social and not just scientists but dialectical scientists so that we can finally write the real history of the “relation of man to nature” in order to save both.

What can be taken from this survey is that the significance of Engel’s pronouncements on the dialectics of the Irish ‘natural conditions’ (the metabolizing organic processes of Nature) is that any dialectical or materialist analysis of the relationship between society and nature has to take on board the idea that Nature is a complex matrix of metabolizing processes. The implications of this insight are profound. Firstly, Nature cannot be perceived to be a thing-like entity, nor can it be investigated in isolation from the rest of concrete reality. Secondly, society’s engagement with these organic processes of Nature is a ‘complex relationship’ which operates on many levels and at many diverse points of interaction between these opposing processes of society and nature. Thirdly and finally, any notion of society being dominant over nature has to be qualified by the knowledge that because nature is essentially a process, the concept of dominance can only be maintained where society is conceptualized as effectively manipulating the inherent forces of nature for its own benefit. It does not imply that all of these forces are fully controlled and mastered by society. The inherent complexity of a dynamic process, and even more so when that process is ‘the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’ processes of nature, counteracts any attempt of a total masterful control. Even Capitalism cannot produce Nature in a production process, at most it can only appropriate certain aspects of its organic forces, especially in cultivating agricultural products!

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Clodagh O’Malley Gannon and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro for their comments and editorial guidance. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks.

References

Bellamy, David. 1986, The ‘Wild’ Boglands: Bellamy’s Ireland, London, Christopher Helm.
Caird, James, 1850, The Plantation Scheme, or the West of Ireland as a Field for Investment, Edinburgh.

Engels, Frederick, 2015, Anti-Duhring, Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science, New York, Wallachia Publishers.

Engels, Frederick, 1986, The Dialectics of Nature, Moscow, Progress Publishers.
Ilenkov, Evald, 1982, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, Progress

Publishers, Moscow.
Lavergne, Leonce de, 1855, The Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland, London.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1975 Collected Works, vol.1-1835-1843, London: Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1976, Collected Works, vol.5. 1845-47, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1987, Collected Works – Letters, vol.42- 1864-69. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1985, Collected Works, vol. 42. 1864-68, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 2001, Collected Works, vol.49 -1890-92. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, 1971, Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl, 1976, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Slater, Eamonn and Terrence McDonough, 2008, ‘Marx on nineteenth-century Ireland: analyzing colonialism as a dynamic social process’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxvi, no. 142:153-172.

Slater, Eamonn, 2013, ‘Marx on Ireland: the dialectics of Colonialism’ NIRSA Working Papers Series, no.73.

Young, A. 1780, A tour in Ireland, 2 vols. Cairnes, Dublin.

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Abstract: This article provides a new insight into Marx’s’ understanding of colonialism. In highlighting the method of dialectical inquiry used by Marx in an undelivered speech document (November 1867) it reveals how the essential structure of British colonial domination of Ireland, was not just a condition of existence of economic or political dependency but a constantly evolving social process, which moved through differing phases of development. As a systematic process of colonial repression, it penetrated all aspects of the Irish social formation and to such an extent that thecolonised had to live under ‘abominable conditions of existence’.²

The MEGA (Marx – Engels Gesumtausgahe)

(publication of the entire works of Marx and Engels) is revolutionising our understanding of Marx’s dialectical methodology and thereby our perception of the workings of the real world. In opening a window on Marx’s conceptualising procedures, we finally gain an insight into how Hegel’s work influenced Marx’s development of his dialectical analysis3. The more we uncover the ‘inner workings’ of his dialectical technique, the more we are assured we can move the dialectic beyond Marx and develop it ourselves as an analytical tool that can not only revolutionize our understanding of our contemporary world but also allow us to revolutionize that world.

This article attempts to embrace the same emancipatory spirit of the MEGA project and accordingly to release Marx’s pronouncements on Ireland from its perceived empirical straitjacket4 to reveal not only a dynamic dialectical framework but also a colonial dialectic which determined the Irish organic totality. Accordingly, my task is as much about excavating the underlying conceptual structure as it is about reproducing what Marx stated about colonised Ireland.

Marx’s Perception of Colonial Ireland

In a previous work, I (with Terrence McDonough) suggested that Marx’s (and Engels) perception of colonial Ireland was not to see it as an unchanging condition of existence but an ever-evolving process of domination. This process of colonialism was constantly passing through phases of evolution and its political structure was made up of a number of distinct factions, which were at times competing with each other for dominance within the structure of the colonising regime5.

Dialectical Understanding of Colonized Ireland

Here I want to move the analysis on by proposing that Marx attempted to comprehend this organic totality of a colonised Ireland dialectically and I will attempt to ‘unearth’ this method of procedure. There is more to this conceptual endeavour of Marx than just the application of a dialectical framework, in that the actual empirical object of investigation was outside the confines of his original problematic of the capitalist mode of production and beyond the empirical boundaries of Britain.

Marx’s Mature Social Theory

Recently, Anderson6 (2010) has suggested that the mature Marx was not only working on ‘margins’ of capitalism, – in the sense of those margins were non-western societies – but also that his problematic had moved from a near totally exclusive economic object of investigation as conceptualised in the mode of production to a much more non-reductionist totality, which included a wide range of non-economic aspects:

Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference but also on occasion made those particulars – race, ethnicity, or nationality – determinants for the totality. Such was the case when he held that an Irish national revolution might be the “lever” that would help to overthrow capitalism in Britain 7.

Therefore, as in Anderson’s suggestion, Ireland was one of these non-reductionist totalities that Marx engaged with in his ‘mature social theory’ – those that were at the margins of capitalism. In addition, being at the margin meant not only being ‘non- western’ but also non-capitalist and as was often the case in the nineteenth century, being colonised as well! In Marx’s opinion, Ireland certainly fitted into these latter categories. Ireland was a totality that was determined by not only Anderson’s ‘particulars of race, ethnicity and nationalism’ but also by being non-capitalist and colonised. As we are going to uncover, every totality has a predominant determinant, which ‘shapes’ the overall structure of the totality and the ‘particulars’ within. In the case of Ireland and Marx’s understanding of it, it is colonialism that is the ‘general illumination, which bathes all the other colours, and modifies their particularity’8.

Capitalism and Colonialism

However, if this is so, a crucial question remains to be answered and that is how does Capitalism operate in or penetrate into a totality dominated by colonialism? David Norman Smith in his discussion of Marx’s later writings on ethnology suggests that ‘Capitalism, as Marx had always argued, is an essentially dynamic system, which grows at the expense of the non-capitalist world. The ultimate tendency of this “metabolism” with the outside world is to break down the barriers that keep capital at bay’9.

I hope to prove that the determining ‘barrier’ which, kept capital at bay in the Irish case was colonialism itself. And if this is so the answer to Smith’s following on question becomes crucial to our understanding not only of colonialism but also of capitalism, but especially ‘capitalism’ at the margin – ‘So what, then does capital encounter in its outward spiral?’10

Marx’s View on English Rule in Ireland

Marx introduced this new Irish ‘problematic’ in a short article published in the New-York Daily Tribune on 11th of July 1853, entitled ‘The Indian Question – Irish Tenant Right’. Within, Marx summarised the extent of English rule in Ireland in the following:

England has subverted the conditions of Irish society. At first it confiscated the land then it suppressed the industry by ‘Parliamentary enactments’, and lastly, it broke the active energy11 by armed force. And thus England created thoseabominable ‘conditions of society’ which enable a small caste of rapacious lordlings to dictate to the Irish people the terms on which they shall be allowed to hold the land and live upon it12.

In summarising these ‘abominable’ conditions of subversion, Marx, I want to propose, was in fact highlighting the essential characteristics of the British colonial misrule. What we can take from this succinct synopsis of his understanding of Ireland in the 1850s is that to explicate these colonial ‘conditions of Irish society (including its economy)’, we need to be able to assess the degree of subversion operating throughout the entire structure of the Irish social formation. Even within the above brief quotation, we get a sense that Marx’s object of inquiry is not just confined to a mode of production as it was in his major opus, Capital, but includes other societal levels beyond the economic.

These levels therefore include not only the economic (‘industry’), but also the political (‘Parliamentary enactments’), the repressive state apparatus (‘armed force’(s)), the legal system (‘dictate … terms’), and civil society (‘the active energy’ of ‘the Irish people’). Consequently, Marx is essentially concerned with analysing as he stated in the opening line of the quotation, ‘the conditions of a society’, which were apparently made up of a number of levels. In fact, it is an ‘organic totality’ of a society colonised!

Organic Totality of a Society

Nevertheless, this new theoretical object of investigation is not only multi-layered, it is also moving asindicated by the sequence of events created by the use of ‘at first … then … and lastly’. Furthermore, if it is moving, it is a process, in which its diverse moments enfold themselves into a mediated totality. Marx in the following captures the necessary sense of movement involved in a totality, which is an organic system/process:

This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements to itself, or creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.¹³

And in ‘subordinating all elements to itself’ an organic totality becomes an ‘internal law- governed structure’14 in which one essential structure (process) becomes dominant – ‘In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination, which bathes all the other colours, and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.’15

Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law stated that Marx ‘did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings; he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion’16. This ontological view of the concrete world is supported by Marx’s own words from 1842 in which he refers to ‘the contents of the world’ as an ‘unorganised mass of the whole’ with a ‘fluid essence of the content’.17 Ilyenkov argued that Marx perceived any individual entity as essentially a moment within a process: ‘That means that any individual object, thing, phenomenon, or fact is given a certain concrete form of its existence by the concrete process in the movement of which it happens to be involved;….’¹⁸.

Unearthing the Inner Essential Determination

Therefore, the implication of this ontological perspective is that in order to interpret reality we cannot remain at the surface/appearance level of a totality, but we must enter the inner ‘workings’ of that totality. For Marx, empirical data as expressed in ‘… empirical correlations as needing to be explained and for him to explain them meant above all to unearth the mechanisms through which they are brought about, and behind them their conditions’¹⁹ (author’s emphasis) and this search for the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘conditions’ entails uncovering of the ‘inner essential determination’ of these empirical entities.²⁰ 

The Problem of Conceptualizing Organic Totalities

However, Arthur warns us that ‘organic totalities’ are difficult entities to enter conceptually – ‘The problem we face is that a totality cannot be presented immediately, its articulation has to be exhibited; in doing that we have to make a start with some aspect of it’.²¹

In a little referred to section in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2, Marx distinguished between two contrasting approaches to investigating concrete phenomena. Historically, in the development of the science of political economy, the first and necessary stage of investigation ‘takes the external phenomena of life, as they seem and appear and merely describes, catalogues, recounts and arranges them under formal definitions’²². If this is the only method of investigation used it:- ‘leads to erroneous results because it omits some essential links and directly seeks to prove the congruity of the economic categories with one another’²³.

In the development of a science, this empirical ‘method of approach’ has to be superseded by a more analytical form of investigation, which ‘traces the intrinsic connection existing between economic categories or the obscure structure of thebourgeois economic system’²⁴. In short, it ‘penetrate(s) the inner physiology of bourgeois society’²⁵ which ‘extract(s) the quintessence out of the divergency and diversity of the various phenomena’²⁶. Therefore, for Marx the truly scientific endeavour is characterised by the latter approach. In this dialectical approach, Marx actually suggests that there are two necessary conceptual trajectories to follow, in order to analyse an organic totality dialectically:

The presentation of the whole … as a rich totality of many determinations and relations is done by firstly discovering through analysis a small number of determinant abstract, general relations … As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began economic systems. Then begins the second ‘path’, [where] ‘the abstract determination leads towards a reproduction of the concrete – the concrete is concrete because it is the concentrations of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse. It is ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is [the] only way²⁷ (emphasis added).

What we take from these complex assertions concerning the methodological techniques of Marx’s analysis is that there appear to be two diametrically opposing trajectories involved in conceptualising an ‘organic totality’. The initial procedure of analysis, Marx identified as the method of inquiry, which is differentiated from the method of exposition (presentation):

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.

The initial path or trajectory of the method of inquiry involves the ‘descend from the concrete to the abstract’²⁸ is about uncovering ‘a small number of determinant general relations’ (Marx, above quotation) and thus explicating ‘their forms of intercourse’²⁹ within the totality. This is how the dialectical method of inquiry is able to get beneath the surface of an organic totality and to arrive finally at the abstract inner connections of its essential determination. This ‘inner connexion’ of ‘a small number of determinant general relations’ is not a thing-like structural core but a process³⁰, which is an ‘active middle’. Marx in his discussion of how capital is the essential determinant of the capitalist organic totality locates capital as the ‘active middle’ (process) between ground rent and wage labour:

The inner construction of modern society, or, capital in the totality of its relations, is therefore posited in the economic relations of modern landed property, which appears as a process; ground rent – capital – wage labour (the form of the circle can be put the another way; as wage-labour – capital – ground rent; but capital must always appear as the active middle.³¹ (emphasis added).

What Marx is suggesting here is that not only is the relationship between modern rent, capital and wage-labour a process which forms a circle with capital as its core but also this capital-core is itself a process because it is not just a middle but an ‘active middle’. Consequently, the initial trajectory of Marx’s conceptualisation of the organic totality is not only to uncover these ‘internal relations’³² but to explicate them as mediating processes, which has a determining active middle process. Having arrived at this point of being able to reveal the internal law-governed active middle, which we now have identified as the essential moving process of the totality, the trajectory of conceptualising is now reversed and ‘then begins the second “path” ‘of rising from the abstract to the concrete’³³. This final path has been described by Marx as his method of exposition (presentation) where the ‘active middle’ 34 of the totality is a process in which this ‘abstract determinations leads to a reproduction of the concrete’35 conceptually.

We have in our possession two already published works in which Marx attempts to engage in unravelling the colonial conditions, which Britain imposed upon Ireland. These two pieces were originally handwritten in manuscript form – notes on an undelivered speech (26 November 1867) (six printed pages) and a delivered speech (16 December 1867) (fourteen printed pages). Although, these works are short and much of the assertions are in note form, but it should not be forgotten that the documents were not just intended for self-clarification but were composed to be presented to an audience. In this context, Marx must be seen to be attempting to give a consistent and coherent account of this particular subject matter. I believe the coherence of the speech documents is achieved, by his use of an underlying conceptual apparatus, which determine Marx’s methods of inquiry and exposition and the difference between them. It is the method of inquiry, which is embedded in the Undelivered Speech of 26 th November that I want to examine in detail in this article and the explication of the conceptual apparatus of the method of exposition of the Delivered Speech of 16 th December will have to wait for another occasion.

With regard to explicating the dialectics of the Irish colonial organic totality from Marx’s speech documents of November and December of 1867, the analytical structure of the arguments appear to be quite different. The contrasting ordering of the subheadings of the speeches as the following suggests indicates this difference:

In contrasting the sequence of the speech document’s subheadings, it becomes obvious that they are structured along two contrasting paths of conceptual unfolding with regard to investigating the colonial phase of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’. In the Undelivered Speech, Marx begins with the subheading of the ‘Decrease in Population’ and movesthrough various concrete levels to arrive at the penultimate level of ‘Clearing the Estate of Ireland’. This reflects the necessary trajectory of the dialectical method of inquiry of descending from the concrete to the abstract essential process of this colonial organic totality. While, in the Delivered Speech, the ordering of the subheadings is nearlydiametrically the opposite, where Marx begins with the ‘Clearing of the Estate of Ireland’ – the abstract middle process – and then moves through again various concrete levels to

come to the essential concrete form of the ‘consolidation of farms’ in the post-Famine period. Accordingly, the architectural form of the conceptual movement of the Delivered Speech is determined by Marx’s dialectical method of exposition and its determining trajectory of ascending from the abstract to the concrete – ‘of ascent from the abstract to the concrete’ 36

However, in this article I am only explicating dialectical form of investigation/inquiry as in the Undelivered Speech. With regard to his method of inquiry, Kosik has suggested that Marx’s framework involved three stages:

‘1. Appropriating the material in detail, mastering it to the last historically accessible detail.

2. Analysing its different forms of development.
3. Tracing out their internal connections, i.e. determining the unity of different

forms in the development of the material’37.

The first two stages as indicated by Kosik are concerned with the empirical appropriation of data and locating the apparent correlation between them, the final stage is about ‘unearthing’ the ‘very complicated mass of interconnected processes of development mutually interacting and altering forms of their manifestation38. As Marx unfolds these empirical processes as internally connected, their subsequent enfolding suggests that the last process presented engulfs the previous ones and they all form ‘moments’ of an enlarging ‘spiral’ type entity, shaped like an ever ‘expanding curve’ rather than a ‘simple circle’39 Their internal moving interaction implies mutual conditionality, where development assumes a form of a spiral as Ilyenkov proposes:

This dialectics of all real development … in which the condition becomes conditioned, the cause its effect, the universal becomes the particular, is the characteristic feature of internal interaction through which actual development assumes the form of a circle or, to be more precise of a spiral which extends the scope of its motion all the time, with each new turn.40

Ilyenkov therefore suggests that in his method of inquiry Marx descends from the concrete to the abstract in search of the essential active middle process. This descent is achieved by ‘dissolving’ concrete entities as they appear on the surface of society into moments of processes that unfold from each other and thus create not only an internal network of relationships but also one that is in a state of flux41. Consequently, this general process of unfolding develops into a spiral hierarchy of internally related processes as the emerging processes unfold and encompass all the previous unfolded processes. Therefore, although, the overall movement in this method of inquiry is one from the concrete empirical entities towards the more abstract internally related processes, those abstract processes resurface now and again to incorporate new empirical moments42.

The major technical problem with Marx’s method of presentation in these ‘speech’ pieces is that many of the conceptual formulations are written in note form, – condensed and compressed, as is the norm with speech note constructions. In dealing with the note form difficulty, I propose that we can incorporate the more developed conceptualisations from other published sources, which are dealing with the same subject matter but in a more extended format. Since, both texts come from the pen of Marx, I attempt to bring in to our exposition here, Marx’s own formulations from these other sources – newspaper articles, sections from Capital, (of particular importance is ‘Section 5 (f) Ireland from chapter 25 of vol. 1 (17 pages) and finally Marx’s letter correspondence to various people but especially with Engels (and in certain cases Engels’ own formulations). I also attempt to use those formulations which are closest to the particular timeframe of original texts, – November and December of 1867 and to help the reader, I present the material quoted from the Undelivered Speech in italics

Consequently, I have attempted to follow a sequence of priority insertion of the more extended formulations into the text here, firstly from Marx’s own works, then Engels. I believe I can do this without destroying the explanatory power of Marx’s analytical framework, because within these two speech manuscripts there is an essential architectonic framework that structures the logic of presentation.

As I am attempting to explicate Marx’s theoretical framework from the Undelivered Speech document here, I believe it is necessary to follow the logic of his argument as it unfolds, especially since it is dialectically constructed. Therefore, most of my work is concerned with interpreting what Marx is saying. However, beyond the appearance of the empirical arguments there is an essential abstract conceptual process, which is determining the architectonic structure of the arguments. In order to highlight this ‘hidden’ conceptual movement it is necessary to break off from our interpreting endeavours to discuss in detail the underlying and unfolding theoretical apparatus. To do this, I have divided the paper into three sections. The first section has dealt with the concept of a colonised society being an organic totality. The second section is about interpreting what Marx is saying about the Irish colonial situation. Moreover, the final one attempts to make explicit Marx’s dialectical framework with regard to his method of inquiry into colonial Ireland.

In a letter to Engels dated 30th November 1867, Marx tells his friend that he was relieved that at the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association meeting (26th November) he was not called upon to talk on Fenianism. The reasons he gave for his relief was that he had a ‘troublesome physical condition’, caused by a fever that lasted a fortnight and ‘passed only two days ago’43. And secondly that the subject matter of the meeting, Fenianism, ‘was liable to inflame the passions to such heat that I would be forced to hurl revolutionary thunderbolts instead of soberly analysing the state of affairs and the movement as I had intended’44. However, Marx then goes onto to admit that he was actually ill-prepared – ‘As a matter of fact what I prepared for Tuesday last was not a speech but points of a speech’45.

Just over three weeks later, on December 16, Marx finally gave his ‘Fenian’ speech to the Communist Educational Association of German Workers in London. Accordingly, we now possess copies of his undelivered speech notes for November 26 meeting – Notes and his delivered speech of the December 16 – Outline. By contrasting these nowpublished texts, I believe that we have an opportunity to explore how Marx ‘works up’ his material dialectically. We have evidence from this period that Engels was apparently assessing Marx’s intellectual endeavours for the explanatory effectiveness of his dialectical expositions.46 Here, I will be concentrating on the post-Famine period because Marx dealt with this phase of colonialism in more depth than any of the other identified phases.

We begin with the manuscript of the undelivered speech Notes of November 26, 1867, which is now titled Notes for an undelivered speech on Ireland.

Marx divides his Notes under a number of subheadings, which are Exordium. The Execution (two paragraphs), The Question, What is Fenianisn? (One sentence – ‘What is Fenianism?’), The Land Question. (Three pages), The English People. (Half page) and finally, The Remedy. (Two sentences). The first subheading he entitled 1. Exordium. The Execution, where Marx refers to the recent execution of three Fenians, – Larkin, Allen and O’Brien, as ‘Political Executions’ and this has subsequently politicised the struggle despite the British establishment’s attempt to continue to criminalise the Fenians and their activities:

Since our last meeting the object of our discussion, Fenianism, has entered a new phase. It is baptized in blood by the English Government. [….] They (political executions at Manchester) open a new period in the struggle between Ireland and England. The whole Parliament and liberal press responsible. Gladstone. Reason: to keep up the hypocrisy that this was no political, but a criminal affair47.

Section 2 on Fenianism is blank without any written comments, which supports Marx’s earlier comment that this manuscript was an unfinished outline of a speech. However, Section 3: the Land Question makes up the bulk of the manuscript and is subdivided under the following subheadings:

Decrease in Population, Increase of Livestock from 1855 to 1866, Emigration, How the Process Works, Consolidation and Change of Character of the English Rule in Ireland.

In the first subsection entitled the Decrease of Population, Marx presents a statistical table, which revealed that in the twenty-five-year period, from 1841 to 1866, the population had decreased by 2,650,69348 . Nevertheless, even in the last eleven years of this period, – 1855 to 1866, the population decreased by 1,032,69449. In the following subsections, – Increase of livestock from 1855 to 1866 and Emigration, Marx statistically demonstrated that the continuing decline of the Irish rural population was diametrically contrasted with an increase in livestock – ‘in the same period from 1855 to 1866 the number of livestock… [had a] …total increase of live-stock: 996,877, about one million. Thus 1,032,694 Irish men have been displaced by about one million cattle, pigs, and sheep.’50

And in correlating these ‘movements of population and agricultural produce’51 within this particular time Marx is suggesting that they are connected to each other through a third empirical trend of emigration, as he answers the question, concerning population loss- ‘What has become of them? The emigration list answers. From 1st May 1851 to 31st December 1866:1,730.189.’52

The now revealed relationship between these three concrete movements of human and livestock populations and emigration is that these are now posited as moments in a mediated process and crucially it expands upon being enfolded by two other concrete processes of farm consolidation and the conversion of tillage to pasture:

‘The process has been brought about and is still functioning upon an always enlarging scale by the throwing together or consolidation of farms (eviction) and the simultaneous conversion of tillage to pasture.’53

Having identified the enfolding connection between these empirical processes within in Irish social formation, Marx is not just locating the dominant specific historical trends of this period here he is also initially establishing the empirical dimensions of the organic totality to be analysed.

Marx in a following subsection title sets about uncovering: ‘How the Process works’

This title implies that the mediated process of land consolidation and the increase in pasture is itself being superseded by, as yet an unnamed process which apparently dominates the previously identified processes. We can begin to detect that Marx is unravelling a totalising ensemble of enfolding processes, which are simultaneously constructing an ever-evolving hierarchy of processual levels in a spiral-shaped movement. Marx begins his unravelling of this unnamed process by returning to the empirical areas of population movements and soil productivity. This time he attempts to assess the qualitative decline in the well-being of the majority of the population and the productivity of the Irish soil, which can be summarised in the following:

(a). The People: Deterioration in the overall well-being of the ‘mass of the people’ (near famine conditions and a decline in real wages)54.

(b). The Land: Deterioration in the soil fertility and its average output (dramatic decline in cereals, especially wheat where Ireland has moved from being an exporter to being an importer)55.

Therefore, with a massive exodus of people through continuing emigration, the remaining population and their conditions of production have experienced a deterioration of their conditions of existence in stark contrast to what certain ideologues were advocating for the continuing necessity of more emigration. Marx in an earlier piece of writing (1853) challenged the misconceived optimism of this position:

Like the world in general, we are assured, that Ireland in particular is becoming a paradise for the labourer, in consequence of famine and exodus. Why then, if wages really are so high in Ireland, is it that Irish labourers are flocking in such masses over to England to settle permanently on this side of the ‘pond’, while they formerly used to return after every harvest?56

And with regard to the determination of the apparent loss of soil fertility, Marx again locates the importance of farm consolidation but this time with regard to the subsequent elimination of the cottier class through emigration – ‘Since the exodus, the land has been underfed and overworked, partly by the injudicious consolidation of farms, and partly because under corn-acre the farmer in a great measure trusted to his labourers to manure the land for them’57.

What Marx is referring to here is that the nutrients of the soil that are lost in agricultural production, especially in the production of commodities, are not replaced by nature itself58. They have to be physically put back into the soil in order to restore the ‘natural’ fertility through various types of manuring processes. The cottiers and the small tenants replaced the ‘lost’ soil constituents by manuring the land, but with their exodus, this necessary process of fertilization was stopped, consequently depriving the Irish soil of its ability to sustain its productive fertility59. However, the qualitative deterioration of the land and its immediate toilers is then subsequently contrasted with the increasing financial returns of profit and rent. This is apparently the dominant real contradiction of, the post-famine period, – where the soil and its toilers were being ‘sacrificed’ (expropriated of their respective productive powers) for increased money returns – ‘Rentand profits may increase, although the produce of the soil decreases. The total produce may diminish, but that part of it, which is converted into surplus produce, falling to landlord and greater farmers, instead of the labourer’60.

58 Recently John Bellamy Foster has identified this formulation of Marx as the metabolic rift. Marx even used it in the context of colonial Ireland:

[I]t must not be forgotten that for a century and a half, England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. p.860).

59This clearing of the smallest farm holdings included the cottiers and their tenurial agreement with the tenants of conacre, – ‘cornacre’. The Pre-Famine cottiers rented small plots of land (size varied from half a rood to two acres) from the tenant-farmer, which the cottier generally paid for in labour, – labour days. These plots were used to grow potatoes, which feed the cottier and his family. However, part of the agreement between the tenant and the cottier was that the cottier would ‘fertilize’ the plot, generally with manure or seaweed.

In Capital, vol.1 Marx gives a clearer rendition of this conceptualisation of the dominant real contradiction of this post famine period:

The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation, greatly diminished the produce of the soil, and in spite of the greater area devoted to cattle breeding, brought about decline in some of its branches, and in others an advance scarcely worth mentioning, and constantly interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, the rents of the land and the profits of the farmers increased along with the fall in population, though not so steadily as the latter. The reason for this will easily be understood. On the one hand, with the throwing together of the smallholdings, and the change from arable to pasture land a larger part of the total product was transformed into a surplus product. The surplus product increased although there was a decrease in the total product of which the surplus product formed only a fraction. On the other hand, the monetary value of this surplus product increased still more rapidly than its actual quantity, owing to the rise in the price of meat, wool, etc., on the English market61.

The financial returns on this type of agricultural production ‘falls’ to the landlords and ‘greater farmers’ because a large proportion of the direct producers are expelled from the immediate production process through emigration, thus allowing more of the production to be given over to being a surplus product, or those that remain are more intensively expropriated of their surplus labour through increases in rent returns and profit taking.

Therefore, the apparent contradictory relationship between the increasing financial returns from production and the loss of soil fertility was intensified by the loss of the potential restorers of that fertility, – the cottiers and small tenants through emigration – ‘So result: gradual expulsion of the natives, gradual deterioration and exhaustion of the source of life, the soil’62.

Marx continues – ‘Process of Consolidation. This process has only begun; it is going on in rapid strides’63.

Here again Marx returns to the empirical level in which statistics on the consolidation of landholding reveal not only an increase in farm sizes but they also allow him to project forward these empirical trends of consolidation to predict that if the rate of consolidation is going to continue in its present propensity and reach the English level then more‘expulsion of the natives’ will be needed – ‘Thus to be cleared off 2,847,220, if we number only the farmers and their families’64.

The ‘clearing off’ of this supposed surplus population of agriculturalists is not only a process but a systematic one – ‘This system [is a] natural offspring of the famine of 1846, accelerated by the abolition of the Corn Laws, the rise in the price of meat and wool, now systematic’65.

Therefore, this new process has very divergent moments in its formation as a systematic process. These moments include not only a natural occurrence (The Famine) but also

economic (price rises) and political (Repeal of the Corn Laws) aspects66. In conceptualising it as systematic Marx is proposing that it was not just an immediate reaction to the famine conditions but having come into existence by that event, it became a structural part of the Irish social formation, as he states in the following from Capital:

Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply make a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every year more people than are replaced by births, so that the absolute level of the population falls year by year (footnote –Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922)67.

Finally, Marx identifies this crucial determining process: ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland…’

It is significant that Marx used the concept of the ‘estate’ in naming the process of land clearance in that it not only ‘equates’ Ireland with being essentially an extended landed estate and simultaneously emphases that it is an industrial wasteland having already been deindustrialised by an earlier phases of colonial oppression. Marx continues the sentence by highlighting the consequence of this ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’ – ‘… transforming

66The Repeal of the Corn Laws was to be assessed, by Marx as the ‘chief factor’ in his delivered speech document. Kinealy suggests that it was a conscious and deliberate decision by the British Parliament to sacrifice the Irish poor in order to provide cheap food for the British industrial workers (C. Kinealy, p.49. ‘Was Ireland a Colony?’ in Was Ireland a Colony; Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by T. McDonough, (Irish Academic Press, 2005, Dublin) And according to Marx this was the normal orientation of the Westminster Government to Ireland as ‘the management of merely local concerns of Ireland… was altogether immaterial to Great Britain’ (K. Marx, and F. Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question. (second reprint, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978). p.177. it into an English agricultural district, minus its resident lords and their retainers, separated from England by a broad water ditch’68.

As the Act of Union was the ‘annihilation of the Irish Legislature’69 the process of estate clearances is the annihilation of Irish civil society and reducing it into being ‘only an agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits’70. In a letter to Engels (November 30 1867) Marx explicitly links the process of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ with the colonising process:

‘Clearing the estate of Ireland! Is now the one purpose of English rule in Ireland’71.

The following and final section unravels the ‘overriding moment’ of the colonising process within this particular organic totality of post-Famine Ireland.

The title of this section ‘Change of Character of English Rule in Ireland’ is extremely significant in that it asserts that ‘English Rule in Ireland’ is itself engaged in an evolutionary movement over time – in fact – as a process. Marx proceeds in his explication of this colonial process by looking initially at the contemporary situation and then moving on to examine how that process unfolded over time. Its style of exposition in dense note form needs a lot of elaboration in order to make sense of Marx’s ideas here. The post-Famine manifestation of this colonial process is captured in the following two lines – ‘State only a tool of the landlords. Evictions also employed as a means of political punishment. (Lord Abercorn. England, Gaels in the Highland of Scotland’72.

The immediate ‘character of English Rule in Ireland’ within this post-Famine period is dramatically revealed in the opening statement – ‘State only tool of the landlords’73. This provocative assertion makes the link between the dominant overall process of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ and the political institutions of the state and thereby with the colonial process. Crucially, it is not the obvious institutions of the colonial state that are determining this strategy of clearance but the landlords with the support of the state apparatus. These state institutions included the legal system, the local police force and the army when necessary74. And the crucial colonial ‘moment’ of Irish landlordism in the context of consolidating estate holdings is its ability to use the ultimate form of coercion – eviction – ‘Eviction, also employed as a means of political punishment’75.

It is not possible at this stage to ascertain what concrete instances Marx is referring to here. However, there are numerous examples even after the Famine of ‘political’ evictions. For example, in 1852, a landlord in Mayo evicted 15 tenants because 74As Marx said in 1853 ‘Legislature, magistracy and armed force, are all of them the offspring of improper conditions of society, preventing those arrangements among men which would make useless the compulsory intervention of a third supreme power’ Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question. p.61. of their failure to follow his voting instructions 76. However, what is significant about this type of eviction is that it can legally exist in the Irish social formation, demonstrating how the Irish peasantry had no legal right to defend themselves against such an unfair imposition of ‘abominable’ legal conditions. Next Marx mentions Lord Abercorn without putting him into a context, but if we refer to his letter to Engels on 2nd November 1867 we can gain an insight into why Marx was referring to the Irish Viceroy with regard to evictions – ‘The Irish Viceroy, Lord Abercorn, ‘cleared’ his estate in the last few weeks by forcibly evicting thousands of people. Among them were prosperous tenants whose improvements and investments were thus confiscated!’77.

The Abercorn reference is followed by the word ‘England’. Marx in his discussion of primitive accumulation stated how ‘in England the conversion of arable land into pasture since the decade prior to the middle of the 18th century through the enclosures of the commons, the throwing together of small farms. This is still proceeding’78. Gaels in theHighland Scotland’ is Marx obviously referring to the Highland clearances in Scotland. These short note-like points are subsequently followed by a crucial presentation of the historical development of English rule in Ireland:

Former English policy: displacing the Irish by English (Elizabeth), roundheads (Cromwell). Since Anne, 18th – century politico-economical character only again in the protectionist measures of England against her own colony making religion a proprietary title. After the Union the system of rack-renting and middlemen, but left the Irish, however ground to the dust, holder of their native soil. Present system, quiet business-like extinction, and government only instrument of landlords (and usurers)79.

With regard to the unfolding of empirical categories here there is a definite change in the style of the presentation. Marx obviously switches to a more chronological approach, which deals with a long sweep of Irish history, running from the twelfth century to mid- nineteenth century, within which he appears to locate seven phases in the evolution of the‘character of the English rule in Ireland’. The watersheds of these phases are generally indicated by the name on the throne (or Cromwell) or by an event (which was generally catastrophic to Ireland), followed by a brief description of the characteristic traits ‘of the English rule in Ireland’, i.e., ‘displacing the Irish by English’, ‘protectionist measures’, ‘religion as a proprietary title’, ‘rackrenting and middlemen system’ and finally ‘the present system of extinction’80. This type of historical presentation establishes not only a sense of continuity of purpose in the English governance of Ireland but it also locates the ‘abstract’ process of colonising as the ‘internal’ and dominating process of these identified historical periods, although there are differences in the modus operandi as suggested in the specific historical categories of the strategies adopted.

The concept of the ‘politico-economical character’ used by Marx in this paragraph may be significant in his methodological exploration of colonialism, in that it appears to attempt to combine the political regime with its strategy of subjugating the Irish economy/civil society to its own desired aims. Accordingly, it is an abstract general concept (abstract universal) of colonialism, while its specific concrete manifestation within a particular historical period of English rule of Ireland, e.g., ‘protectionist measures’, ‘rackrenting and middlemen’ appear to take on the forms of the concrete universal within each phase of colonial domination. In a letter to Engels (30th November, 1867) Marx actually identified a change of form of the politico-economical character of the post-Famine period ‘…since 1846 the economic content and therefore also the political domination in Ireland has entered an entirely new phase …’81.

Consequently, the diverse range of colonising strategies and their resultant subverted conditions of existence within Irish society can include cultural, religious, racial, military and of course the economic. In the post-Famine period, these other strategies were dominated by the landlord’s strategy of extinction, which therefore emerges as ‘active middle’ of the colonial process in this particular historical phase of its development. This ‘active centre’ of clearing the land can be contrasted with the preceding phase of colonialism, 1800-1846, where the ‘rackrenting and middlemen’ system was the dominant process of the Irish organic totality. This system ‘left the Irish … ground to dust, holder of their native soil’82. Marx suggested that as early as 1853 that part of this super exploitative rental system was its inability to compensate the native tenantry for agricultural improvements. The implication of this moment in the rackrenting process was that the direct producers and their essential condition of production – the soil – were both being ‘pauperised’:

A tenant having incorporated his capital, in one form or another, in the land, and having thus effected an improvement of the soil, either directly by irrigation, drainage, manure, or indirectly by the construction of buildings for agricultural purposes, in steps the landlord with demand for increased rent. If the tenant concede, he has to pay the interest for his own money to the landlord. If he resist, he will be very unceremoniously ejected, and supplanted by a new tenant, the latter being enabled to pay a higher rent by the very expenses incurred by his predecessors, until he also, in his turn, has become an improver of the land, and is replaced in the same way, or put on worst terms. ….. He had, accordingly, noother alternative left but to become a pauper – to pauperise himself by industry, or to pauperise by negligence83.

The consequence of this type of extreme rental appropriation of, not only the surplus labour (and in extreme cases even part of the necessary labour) of the tenant, but also the tenant’s capital invested (mostly through labour) is that there was little to no investment in the improvement of the land. Therefore, even those that ‘earned’ a rental income such as landlords and middlemen in the pre-Famine period did not invest in agriculture as Marx states – ‘Middlemen accumulated fortunes that they would not invest in the improvement of the land, and they could not, under the system which prostrated manufactures, invest in machinery, etc. All their accumulations were sent therefore to England for investment’84.

The crucial point to emphasize from Marx’s analysis here is that all these highlighted moments of the social processes operating in Irish agriculture suggest that the capitalist mode of production is not in existence in this particular colonial social formation. Marx explicitly states this in vol.3 of Capital – ‘[T]he capitalist mode of production itself does not exist, the tenant himself is not an industrial capitalist, and his manner of farming is not a capitalist one. This is how it is in Ireland, for example. Here the tenant is generally a small peasant85.

Marx then articulates those moments that ‘subvert’ the productive conditions of the Irish peasantry and these revolve around how the specific rental form disrupts the ‘normal’ (capitalist) circulation of capital within the overall production process:

What he pays the landowner for his lease often absorbs not only a portion of his profit, i.e. his own surplus labour, which he has a right to as owner of his own instruments of labour, but also a portion of the normal wage, which he would receive for the same amount of labour under other conditions. The landowner, moreover, who does nothing at all here to improve the soil, expropriates from him the small capital, which he incorporates into the soil for the most part by his own labour, just as a usurer would do in similar conditions. Only the usurer would at least risk his own capital in the operation86.

What we apparently have in this phase of Irish development is, according to Marx’s analysis, colonialism without the capitalist mode of production!

The next phase located in this historical exposition is the post-Famine period, where Marx returns to the particular ‘politico-economical character’, which is further expanded upon from the opening assertion of the paragraph – ‘Present system, quiet business-like extinction, and the government only the instrument of the landlords (and usurers) (emphasis added)87’.

The newly added concepts to the ones in the initial formulation at the beginning of the paragraph are the ‘quiet business-like extinction’ and the ‘usurers’ added within brackets. In the latter concept, Marx is probably referring to how the Encumbered Estates Court ‘turned a mass of previously enriched middlemen into landlords’ (Marx to Engels, 30th November, 1867, 148)88. The ‘quiet business-like extinction’ relates to how the Irish landlords were the instigators of this type of forced emigration (through eviction or assisted emigration) and they were applying this strategy of ‘extinction’ on their own individual landed estates. Consequently, the manifestation of this colonial strategy of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ was realising itself not only at the local level, within the confines of the immediate landed estates, but also across most of the landed estates in Ireland89. Therefore, behind these apparent discrete actions of expulsion there was a collective landlord plan to exterminate the native Irish lower classes as Marx revealed in the late 1850s – ‘The landlords of Ireland are confederated for a fiendish war of extermination against the cott(i)ers; or as they call it, they combine for the economical experiment of clearing the land of useless mouths. The small native tenants are disposed of with no more ado than vermin is by the housemaid’ 90.

However, these Irish landlords were ‘quietly’ going about their ‘business’ of extinction without supposedly the formal consent of the British State and, although this being the case, they were actually using the local apparatuses of that state to carry out their ‘war of extermination’. This was especially true with regard to the necessary legal and physical force requirements in the process of eviction, – the ejectment code etc. In this respect, the colonising British state, especially those apparatuses which maintained social order in the midst of civil turmoil, was being hijacked by these Irish landlords in supporting their actual eviction procedures on the ground by physically assisting the landlord’s crowbarbrigade. In referring to this post-Famine colonial strategy of ‘Clearing of the estate of Ireland’, Marx stated in a letter to Engels (November 30, 1867) that ‘The stupid English government in London knows nothing of course itself of this immense change since

89Marx was aware that there was a need to ‘aggregate’ the individual actions of the landlords in order to discover the systematic approach to the extinction of the Irish peasantry:

‘The clearing of estates only shows, as a systematic process applied to whole counties, what occurred everywhere in detail…’ K. Marx and F. Engels MECW, vol. 28, (Lawrence and Wishart, Moscow, 1986). p.258.

1846’91. A dramatic point in the unravelling of the colonial process has been reached, where the most obvious organ of colonising, – the British Government in London – was unaware of what another faction of the colonising regime was actually enacting on the Irish landed estates, – the landlords and their strategy to extinguish the small tenantry and the cottiers.

So the end point of Marx’s first conceptual path has been reached, – the ‘essential determining structure’ (process), in this phase of colonialism, – ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’. Marx now needs to explicate in detail its specific social form. However, in this document Marx does not engage in this process of exploration but leaves it to his later work which he presented in his delivered ‘Fenian’ speech of the 16th December 1867.

‘The English People’ – This section begins with a general point that the Irish Question was [a] ‘cause of humanity and right, but above all a specific English question’92. It is only when Marx discusses the ‘Irish in England’ that his comments on other occasions can give us some insight into these apparent discrete note forms. These note forms are:

‘Influence on wages, etc. Lowering the character of the English and Irish. The Irish Character. Chastity of Irishmen. Attempts at education in Ireland. Diminution of crimes93.

We are fortunate to have longer elaborations of these assertions available to us from Marx and Engel’s discussions of these topics elsewhere in their works and we can present them in the order of they are unfolded in the above. With regard to the Irish lowering the character and wages of the English workers, Marx famously stated the following in 1870:

The revolutionary fire of the Celtic worker does not go well with the nature of the Anglo-Saxon worker, solid, but slow. On the contrary, in all the big industrial centers in England there is profound antagonism between the Irish proletariat and the English proletariat. The average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He regards him somewhat like the poor whites of the Southern States of North America regard their black slaves94.

These contrasting racial forms as they are presented here were manifesting themselves within the industrial working class of nineteenth century Britain. In this context, the racial traits appear to be conceptualised as reified entities, – the contrasting racial characteristics seem to be innate and immutable. However, appearances can be deceptive because these character traits were being determined by societal conditions – a change in these conditions appear to cause these ‘immutable’ traits to also change. In the ever-revelatory technique of Marx’s dialectical method, the apparent ‘immutable’ surface appearances of discrete entities always end up being mere moments of a constantly evolving organic totality. This becomes evident in the case of these racial traits when Marx discussed the ‘chastity of Irishmen’ prior to them emigrating in Capital, vol.1 – ‘Thousands of Irish families, who according to the testimony of the English, eaten up as these are with national prejudice, are notable for their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for their gaiety and purity of their home-life, found themselves suddenly transplanted into hot- beds of vice’95.

The actual movement from ‘moral’ Ireland to foreign ‘hot-beds of vice’ conditions appear to cause the Irish peasant, according to Engels, to become corruptible – ‘The worst about the Irish is that they become corruptible as soon as they stop being peasants and turn bourgeois. True, this is the case with most peasants. But in Ireland, it is particularly bad’96.

Engels is even more explicit in the following of the moral decay of the Irish as they migrate to English speaking parts of the globe but lays the blame for this decline on colonial oppression – ‘By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation and now, as everyone knows, fulfill the function of supplying England, America, Australia, etc., with prostitutes, casual labourers, pimps, pickpockets, swindlers, beggars and other rabble’97.

The ever-changing racial constructions of the Irish were not only multi-faceted but differing forms of colonial oppression were also determining them. Consequently, the racial traits of the nineteenth century Irish are very different from those of the sixteenth century and not because they evolved within an exclusive cultural sphere but by their relationship with the ever-changing forms of colonialism. Even the trait of melancholy was a consequence of colonialism, which Engels discovered within Irish songs – ‘The melancholy dominating most of these songs is still the expression of the national disposition today. How could it be otherwise amongst a people whose conquerors are always inventing new, up-to-date methods of oppression?’98

Even the emerging forms of education in nineteenth century Ireland were been determined by colonialism, which either were been imposed by the British, or a specific Irish form was adopted to resist the colonial imposition as Engels reveals to Jenny Longuet (Marx) in 1881:

The Irish, neglected by the English government, had taken the education of their own children into their own hands. At a time when English fathers and mothers insisted upon their right to send their children to the factory to earn money instead of school to learn, at that time in Ireland the peasants vied with each other in forming schools of their own. [….] In 1812 there were 4,600 such hedge-schools in Ireland…. So then, these truly national schools did not suit English purposes. To suppress them, the sham national schools were established. [….] Compare with these Irish peasants the English who howl at compulsory school-attendance to this day!99

And finally, with regard to ‘the diminution of crime’ Marx provided not only a criticism of the English racial stereotyping of the Irish but also crucially a damning critique of racial characteristics as a determinant of behaviour:

Strange to say, the only part of the United Kingdom in which crime has seriously decreased, say by 50, and even by 75 per cent, is Ireland. How can we harmonise this fact with the public-opinion slang of England, according to which Irish nature, instead of British misrule, is responsible for Irish shortcomings? It is, again, no act on the part of the British ruler, but simply the consequence of a famine, an exodus, and a general combination of circumstances favourable to the demand for Irish labour, that has worked this happy change in Irish nature.100

Although, the process of racialisation took on many concrete forms and across an ever- expanding range of institutional contexts, the highlighted diverse character traits of the Irish race were determined in the ‘last instant’ by the process of colonialism. In this sense, the cultural forms of racial oppression were exposed as being determined by changingconditions outside the cultural sphere, when these respective ‘badges of conquest were removed [but] the servitude remained’101. And with the specific process of ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’, the particular ‘badge’ was a cultural form of ethnicity, which manifested itself in the decline of the Celtic trait of the Irish population and the subsequent emergence in its place of the ‘Saxon’ cultural form, Engels describes this transformation:

The country was completely ruined by the English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850 (for in reality both the wars and the state of siege lasted as long as that). [….] The people itself got its peculiar character from this, and for all their national Irish fanaticism the fellows feel they are no longer at home in their own country. Ireland for the Saxon! That is now being realized. The Irishman knows that he cannot compete with the Englishman, who comes equipped with means superior in every respect; emigration will go on until the predominantly, indeed almost exclusively, Celtic character of the population is gone to the dogs. How often have the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed, politically and industrially102.

However, there is an ironic ‘twist’ to this depopulation of the Celtic race in Ireland because as they were cleared from their homeland, which was subsequently made into a ‘Saxon’ stronghold, – the Celtic Irish were reappearing in the heartlands of Britain, – in the industrial and political centers of the colonising. This racial revenge was observed by Marx in 1855 – ‘Ireland has revenged herself upon England, socially – by bestowing an Irish quarter on every English industrial, maritime or commercial town of any size, and politically – by furnishing the English Parliament with an “Irish Brigade”’103.

However, the Celtic Irish were not just invading the Saxon heartlands of Britain they were also crucially emerging on the other side of the Atlantic as a political threat to the old colonial queen herself:

With the accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian, and face to face with the old queen of the seas rises, threatening and more threatening, the young giant Republic104.

As we have discovered there is an obvious sense of conceptual movement inherent in Marx’s work here. He begins by examining the specific historical categories on human and livestock population movements by locating an apparent statistical relationship between them and a third factor, – emigration. In establishing a mediated relationship between these three concrete entities Marx revealed that they formed a process and these concrete entities were subsumed under that process as its essential ‘moments’. This initial process is then subsequently enfolded by another empirical process, – ‘farm consolidation – the switch from tillage to pasture’. These now metabolised processes are in turn engulfed by the emergence of an economic process, which appears to be the dominant economic contradiction of this post-Famine period. Where, unlike the capitalist mode of production, the shedding of direct producers from agriculture would be indicative of an increase in the output of production as expressed in relative surplus value, but in this Irish case the fall in the population of agriculturalists saw simultaneously a decline in the ‘produce of the soil’ but an increase in the financial returns of profit and rent.

Therefore, the misery of the labourers and the soil (as manifested in its depletion) is contrasted by the increasing returns on profit taking and rent. These empirical trends are thus linked to each other as the concrete forms of revenue acquisition was determined by the landlords extracting a ‘surplus’ from the direct producers (the tenantry) and theiressential condition of production – the soil. In a strictly mode of production analysis where the organic totality is generally confined to the economic, this grinding extractive process would probably be the overall dominant relationship, and thereby ‘predominates over the rest’ of the relationships to become the ‘active middle’ process. But Marx does not stop at this point of his conceptual pathway but pushes on to unearth a process that will ultimately become the real ‘active middle’ process of this Irish organic totality.

Marx conceptually unfolding the processes towards the determining colonial phase of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland.

Population decrease – livestock increase – emigration ▼

Farm consolidation – increase in pasture ▼

Deterioration in conditions of production – increase in financial returns ▼

Famine – Repeal of the Corn Laws – rise in the price of meat and wool, entitled ’Clearing the Estate of Ireland’.

▼
Colonial State dominated by the ‘clearing’ landlords

In conceptually moving through these processes sequentially Marx finally arrives at what he called the ‘systematic’ process, where the Repeal of the Corn Laws instigated a ‘systematic process’ which involved Westminster passing a parliamentary act which in turn devastated the Irish agricultural economy by collapsing the prices for Irish grain. It was at this point that Marx was able to reveal the essential ‘active middle’ process of this entire concrete totality, – ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ – and subsequently declared it to be ‘the one purpose of English rule in Ireland’. Marx appears to have switched from a more synchronic type of analysis to a more diachronic form as he investigates the emergence of this final phase of ‘English rule in Ireland’ – ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’. Thus, this post-Famine form is itself an evolutionary phase of the British colonising process, where the political process of colonialism metabolises with the economic process of civil society to become the overall dominant process of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’.

Consequently, as Marx ‘descended’ from the concrete to the abstract he arrived at the essential social process of the Irish social formation in its post-Famine phase which was declared to have a specific colonial form to it. Marx therefore has completed his crucial initial path of inquiry and I would presume that he would now turn his attention to the second path of exposition, as he will attempt to retrace his conceptual steps and ascend from the abstract to the concrete. However, on this occasion as we have discovered he did not set out on the second conceptual pathway, – his method of exposition. This failure to continue and move from the abstract to the concrete may be explained by his declared illness when a ‘fever that lasted a fortnight and passed only two days’ 105 before he was scheduled to give the paper on the 26th of November 1867.

It is crucial to highlight that Marx is not describing the features of colonialism in the post-Famine period. He is in fact tracing out the ‘inner connections’ of this organic totality and the precise trajectory of his conceptual movement is determined by how these ‘inner connections’ are structured internally in this real concrete object. We have discovered that Marx in his investigation of this period unravelled a totalising ensemble of enfolding processes, beginning with ‘population loss – emigration – livestock increase’ process at the immediate concrete level to the ‘clearing of the estate of Ireland’ at the ‘abstract’ centre of this particular totality. Nevertheless, crucially it has moved through a number of mediating processes. Therefore, Banaji is right, Marx’s conceptual movement ‘is not a straight-line process’ – ‘One returns to the concrete at expanded levels of the total curve, reconstructing the surface of society in stages, as a structure of several dimensions. And this implies …we find a continuous oscillation between essence and appearance’106.

The latter tendency was obvious in Marx’s work here as he constantly kept referring back to statistics, which identified empirical trends manifesting themselves at the concrete surface level before he uncovered how they were actually mediated moments of underlying processes. The inherent oscillation between appearance and essence and an unfolding of internally mediated processes determines that we perceive the overall structure of this organic totality as ‘expanding curve or spiral-movement composed of specific cycles of abstraction (of processes). Each cycle of abstraction, and thus the curve as a whole, begins and ends with …the realm of appearances …107.

However, there is another crucial determination of the spiral structure to the organic totality and that has to do with understanding movement within a totality and specifically between processes. When Marx initially unfolds these processes, they have a tendency to appear to be mere circles, forming an internal unity and whose elements are mutually conditioning, ‘in which the condition becomes conditioned, the cause becomes the effect, the universal becomes the particular, is a characteristic feature of internal interaction through which actual development assumes the form of a circle’…108. This is an illusion created by the process of abstraction as the real concrete ‘is the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse’109. In our case, it is the unity of diverse processes! Therefore, mediating processes smash open the inherent tendencies of an individual process to be self- conditioning and thus taking on a circular form. Therefore, Marx’s initial process of his Notes here, ‘the population loss – emigration – livestock increase’ process forms a such-like circle of self-conditioning. But this process was subsequently engulfed by another process, – ‘the consolidation of farms and the switch from tillage to livestock’, – which not only merged the two processes but they subsequently began to expand ‘upon an always enlarging scale…’110 Marx has conceptualised this type of expanding movement as a change in form from a circular to a spiral form – ‘…. the gradual propagation of capital by reproduction passing it from a circular into a spiral form…’111

Therefore, since the essence of an organic totality is movement as ‘mutual interaction’ takes place between different moments (processes), thus the mediating processes will always form an ever-enlarging and expanding spiral curve in its inner configuration. Therefore, the essential inner determination of an organic totality will be the active middle process like the valorisation process in capitalism. This is also true with regard to what we have uncovered in the post-Famine phase that ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ is an active middle process of this colonised organic totality112.

Therefore, if Anderson and Smith are right about Marx’s intellectual endeavours in his later years (they both suggest that Marx was attempting to ‘extend his dialectical analysis’ into non-capitalistic social formations, – replicating the real movement of capitalism into these regions), the question arises what type of societal entity was there to be conquered. What I want to suggest from our conceptual odyssey into Marx’s dialectical understanding of the Irish situation is that what was waiting for capitalism at the ‘margins’ were other organic totalities, with their necessary spirals of intermeshing processes and each and every one of these ‘non-western’ totalities having its own specific ‘active middle’ process. Smith grasps the essential and potentially correct trajectory of conceptualisation in his question, – ‘So what, then does capital encounter in its outward spiral?’113 The answer is, – other spirals – of mediating processes that form non- capitalistic organic totalities. In the Irish case, as we have discovered, the indigenous organic totality was dominated by British colonialism, where the normal conditions of a society were transformed into ‘abominable’ conditions.

This process of subversion was imposed on Irish society, as Marx stated in his opening quotation of this article, in order ‘to enable a small caste of rapacious lordlings to dictate to the Irish people the terms on which they shall be allowed to hold the land and live upon it’114. Therefore, capitalism is,to paraphrase Smith, being ‘barred’ by how a particular form of commodity production, which had ‘metabolised’ with an Irish organic totality where colonial landlordism dominated. Marx repeatedly stated that ‘All that the English government succeeded in doing was to plant an aristocracy in Ireland’115. And as a consequence, of this imposed landlordism, it is the rental relationship which was the main driver of accumulation rather than capital as in the capitalist mode of production. This itself, is a consequence of the particular colonial configuration of the Irish organic totality that made commodity production unable to become ‘completed’ in its capitalist form. Marx in his Preface to theGerman edition of Capital brilliantly captures this contradictory relationship between fully developed capitalist production and its ‘incompleted’ form:

In all other spheres, and just like the rest of Continental Western Europe, we suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead116.

Therefore, commodity producers ‘at the margins’, who produce under non-capitalist conditions of production suffer from both the ‘living … [and] the dead. In the sense that they have to live with market competition from capitalist commodity producers and simultaneously produce those commodities without the more developed capitalist forces of production. These non-existent conditions of production are therefore ‘dead’ to these ‘petty’ commodity producers. In the Irish colonial case, Marx in his discussion of the Irish peasantry outlined the precariousness of such a relationship between the non- capitalist Irish peasant producer and capitalism – ‘They are, one after the other, and with a degree of force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an agriculture managed by capital, and therefore they continually furnish new recruits to the class of wage- labourers117.

However, it needs to be stated that, although they are generally ‘crushed’ by foreign capitalist competition, they do not join the ranks of the Irish industrial wage-labourers because their respective industrial enterprises have already been ‘cleared’ from the Irish landscape in previous crushing bouts of colonial oppression and as a consequence, the ‘ejected’ Irish peasantry become proletariats in foreign locations. Therefore, they are cleared not only from their landed estates also from their homeland!

Accordingly, as we have discovered colonialism, is a multi-faceted process, which has an innate ability to manifest itself throughout a societal organic totality on many levels and within differing and diverse forms. Its omnipotent presence and its constantly changing forms ‘bath’ all in its hue to such an extent that its existence belies direct empirical observation and subsequent description; it is only when we attempt to perceive it through the prism of a dialectical framework that its presence becomes obvious. In holding Marx’s Undelivered Speech document up to the mirror of dialectics, the apparent concrete empirical data presented in its statistical and factual forms melt away to reveal an underlying ensemble of constantly moving internal processes. These levels penetrate each other, – the concrete entities end up as moments within abstract processes and the internal processes are the determination of concrete entities of reality. Both the concrete and the abstract forms thus interact with each other to become an organic totality.

Levine argues that in the 1861-3 workbooks, Marx arrived at a new definition of capitalism. Until the drafts of 1861-3 Marx had remained close to Adam Smith’s definition of capitalism as stored-up labour, this was modified by Marx to mean stored-up surplus labour. In these drafts, he begins to redefine capitalism as a process of valorisation118. Levine suggests that ‘[t]he storing up of labour is quantitative…The valorisation process, on the other hand, refers to the inherent tendencies of a system, the necessary drive of an organic totality to increase surplus-value’119.

What I believe is crucial about this ‘epistemological break’ is that it indicates how Marx is moving away from not only the empiricism of classical political economy but also towards a more Hegelian framework, in which reality is seen as a continuous moving process (or processes). The subsequent analysis replicates this sense of movement in how there is an inherent sense of conceptual movement in Marx’s methods of inquiry and exposition. This crucial attribute of the dialectical approach can cause problems in any attempt to provide a definitive definition of a particular structure or process within the totality under investigation. Again, Chris Arthur highlights this difficulty with regard to the concepts of value and capital within Marx’s dialectical analysis of them:

The upshot is that value cannot be defined in the simple sense of either substance pre-existing exchange or as a mere phenomenal relation, but only as a moment of a totalizing process of development of internally related forms of a complex whole … whose internal moments…are nested within each other and enfold one another in an ever-moving mediatedness … A methodological consequence of this is that the concept of capital …requires not a definition …but a dialectical exposition of its inner self-development120.

If this is so with regard to all organic totalities, it is so with regard to our attempt to explicate Marx’s dialectical presentation of the colonial dialectic within the organic totality of post-Famine Ireland, in which colonialism has to be understood and analytically grasped as process with ‘its inner self-development’.

Peter Hudis is right when he stated that with regard to Marx’s work on colonialism, we ‘still have much to learn from the method and approach that Marx employed in his studies on colonialism,’121.

And especially in the case of colonial Ireland!

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As ‘Nature works dialectically’, Engels and Marx analyse climate and climate change dialectically.

‘Unsystematic philosophizing can only be expected to give expression to personal peculiarities of mind, and has no principle for the regulation of its contents’ (Hegel, Hegel’s logic 1975, 20) (7).

ABSTRACT: The premise of this article is based on the assertion that Engels made which he suggested that ‘nature works dialectically’. Consequently, concrete organic reality is not a solid thing-like entity but a complex matrix of interconnecting processes that form an organic totality. The existence of a dialectical reality has profound implications for how we can conceptualise that reality and even more critically how we physically relate to and interfere with that dialectical reality, especially when that reality is also organic. The organic processes of nature, according to Engels and Marx, are dominated by the climatic process, that ‘life-awakening force’ of soil fertility. However, what determines the form of the local weather system (the local manifestation of the climatic process) is how that system interconnects with the other organic processes of nature – geological structures, vegetation and the soil processes and they all are subsequently moments of that overall climatic process. The presence of interconnecting processes determining concrete reality, questions the validity of linear cause and effect formulation to account for the determination of that dialectical reality. This one-sided form of causation has to be replaced by a many-sided formulation as expressed in Marx’s famous proposal that the ‘concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations. Hence the unity of the diverse’. The new epoch of planning our relationships with nature, has to include the adoption of the dialectical framework, conceptually within the sciences and practically in the processes of cultivation.

Introduction

Engels in the following suggests that there is similarity between Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’ and the bourgeois idea of free competition and how conscious planning can overcome this competitive condition of existence:

Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done for mankind in the specifically biological aspect. (Engels 1986, 35).

However, what I want to propose in this article is that the same holds true for the organic world of nature as it is for the social world of bourgeois capitalism. We equally need to engage with nature ‘in a planned way’ in order to overcome the catastrophic damage we are inflicting on the diverse ecologies of the earth. This assertion I hope to prove reflects Marx and Engels views as derived from their dialectical analysis of organic nature and society’s relationship to that organic structure. The ‘conscious organisation of social production’ and our relationship to organic nature, according to Engels, will bring in a new epoch in the historical evolution of humanity:

Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with the mankind all branches of its activity, and particularly natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade (Engels 1986, 35).

It is more than interesting that Engels explicitly identified that natural science would experience this epoch changing conscious organization in planning our relationships with concrete reality. We have to presume that this ‘advance’ in these sciences would have to manifest itself as a conceptual one, in fact as a fundamental paradigm changing occurrence. What I want to suggest is that this advance in natural science is to be achieved by the necessary adoption of the dialectical framework within the natural sciences and its subsequent application to organic nature. The reasons for the need of dialectical analysis, is that the concrete reality in general and its natural form in particular, are determined by dialectical laws of evolution, which is succinctly expressed by Engels in the assertion that ‘nature works dialectically’ (Engels 1987, 24). However, the above is concerned with the epistemological problematic of this article, the more substantive aspect is concerned with Marx and Engel’s analysis of climate and to a lesser extent climate change and with Ireland as the empirical case study of this change.

In contemporary debates of the Left on climate change, there is little to no reference to what Marx and Engels had to say on this subject matter. This is rather surprising as there are numerous comments on climate spread throughout their works as little vignettes of insights. The problem with them is that there is no extensive discussion of these insights and they remain hidden as mere passing comments. However, there is one location that has the possibility of providing a conceptual framework that would allow us to order these discrete conceptualizations into a conceptual apparatus and that is in Engel’s work on the dialectics of nature in his unfinished book – The Dialectics of Nature. In this, much neglected work,

Engels does provide us with the opportunity to explicate such a theoretical framework, which conceptually incorporates climate within an in-depth analysis of the organic processes of nature and allows us to assess change within those complicated organic relationships.

This article attempts to redress this lacuna and to go on to demonstrate that it is possible to construct such a coherent dialectical framework, which can conceptually grasp the complexity of the organic forces of the earth’s climates. More importantly, Marx and Engel’s analysis of climate and climate change has the potential to inform the contemporary debates of conceptual formulations that go beyond the empirical paradigms of the natural sciences, especially with regard to explicating the causes of this global phenomenon of Climate Change.

In order to help the process of exposition I want to examine in detail Engels more ‘empirical’ investigation of the climate and the weather systems of Ireland. Within, we have an example of how a dialectical analysis can enlighten our understanding of the complexity of the organic forces of nature, including climate, manifesting themselves at a concrete and local level. Engels provided detailed information of the Irish ecological conditions in a chapter, entitled ‘Natural Conditions’ in his unfinished book on the History of Ireland.

In order to highlight the unfolding arguments of this article, I have provided a sum- mary of the main conceptual points made at the end of each section within a shaded box so that we can follow the trajectory of the conceptual framework that is emerging. In the conclu- sion, I summarise these ‘shaded’ conceptual points in order to provide a clearer overview and more abstract insight of the unfolded dialectical framework.

The conclusion reached is that neither organic nature nor cultivated nature is a solid a thing- like entity but its opposite – a fluid interplay of interconnecting processes, which are not only metabolising with each other but also with regard to cultivation they also metabolise with societal processes. This fundamental reinterpretation of organic reality in which ‘nature works dialectically’ critically challenges the conceptual ability of the linear form of cause and effect to explain this dialectical reality.

A dialectical epistemology for a dialectical world

In a letter that Marx wrote to Engels on 27 June 1867, Marx identified the epistemological orientation that determined how vulgar economists perceive reality:

Here it will be shown how the philistines’ and vulgar economists’ manner of conceiving things arises, namely, because the only thing that is ever reflected in their minds is the immediate form of appearances of relations, and not in their inner connections.

These theorists, unfortunately they are no longer confined to economics, are vulgar because they conceive reality as not only being made up of thing-like substances but also those ‘real’ substances form a vast collection of diverse isolated objects. Therefore, what distinguishes one thing-like entity from another is their ‘immediate form of appearance’ so that in attempting to understand the workings of this particular ‘reified’ reality it is sufficient to

remain at the surface level of reality1. However, in opposing this vulgar conceptualisation of reality, scientific endeavour, according to Marx, enters into an examination of not just the inner essence of these supposedly discrete entities (as enshrined in the methodology of bourgeois science) but also into their ‘inner connections’ (as the essential trajectory of dialectical analysis). However, with regard to the vulgar ‘reified’ ontology Marx proposed that: ‘Incidentally, if the latter was the case, we surely have no need of science at all’. (Marx to Engels 27 June 1867). So dialectics is firmly located within the scientific tradition of reductionism, but it fundamentally differs from that tradition in that it is the ‘science of inter- connections’ (Engels). It is these ‘inner connections’ and their ‘form of interplay’ that distinguishes dialectics from the ‘rest’ of scientific endeavours:

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause on the one hand and effect on the other. But what they fail to see is that this is an empty abstraction, that in the real world much metaphysically polar opposites exist only in crisis, that instead the whole process takes place solely and entirely in the form of interplay – if of very unequal forces of which the economic trend is by far the strongest, the oldest and most vital – and that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. So far as they are concerned, Hegel might never have existed (CW 49 -1890-92 –Engels: 63).

Marx and Engels were life-long advocates of dialectical analysis and they continually asserted that it was the only form of enquiry that could not only conceptually grasp the complexity of a totality but it could also adequately comprehend and convey the constant movement between processes that determine that organic totality. Engels in the following suggests that the difference between the dialectical approach and the natural scientist’s ‘metaphysical2’ (empirical) understanding of the real world:

Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure. Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, nature works dialectically and not metaphysically (Engels, Anti-Duhring MECW vol. 25, 23/4) (emphasis added).

The first underlined conceptualisation of Engels is a good summary of the essential components of the epistemology of dialectical methodology as developed by Marx and Engels. It concerns uncovering the interconnections that exist between processes and how they constantly change over time. But this approach is not just applied to the evolution of the economic forms of societies as Marx did in Capital, but according to Engels it can also be adopted to investigate the organic forms of nature because ‘nature works dialectically’.

1Engels stated that [t]he empiricism of observation alone does not adequately prove necessity. Post hoc but not proper hoc. (Engels 1986, 229).
2 Engels defines metaphysics in the following:

If, however, we adhere one-sidedly to a single standpoint as the absolute one in contrast to the other, or if we arbitrarily jump from one to the other according to the momentary need of our argument, we shall remain entangled in the one-sidedness of metaphysical thinking; the inter-connection escapes us and we become involved in one contradiction after another (Engels 1986, 167).

However, this dialectical methodology is fundamentally the opposite of the approach adopted by the natural sciences, which has a tendency to ‘reify’ concrete reality as Engels proposes:

The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and organic objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms – these were the fundamental conditions of gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature which have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of work has also left us with a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole, of observing them in repose, not in motion, as constants, not as essentially variables, in their death, not in their life’ (Engels, Anti-Duhring MECW, vol.25, 22) (emphasis added).

Thus, the framework of the non-dialectical sciences, is embedded in understanding of concrete reality as consisting of ‘natural objects and processes in isolation’ without any ‘connection with the vast whole’ of the organic totality of concrete reality. It could also be suggested, that this inherent tendency is intensified because of how these empiricaldisciplines perceive their scientific task as providing ‘practical’ solutions to immediate problems. The overall consequence of these tendencies within non-dialectical sciences is that the trajectory of their research is to investigate the ‘internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms’ without any attempt to explore the possibilities of determinant interconnections between the supposed discrete and isolated entities that are their misconceived aspects and conditions of existence of reality. Accordingly, these non- dialectical theorists cannot adequately conceptualise the causal link between differing entities, because they are under the hegemonic impression that there is no linkage norinterconnection between the ‘things’ of the concrete world.

This inherent weakness is not obvious to the non-dialectical eye where concrete reality and its contents appear to be made up of a vast array of separate and independent entities, whose apparent relationship with each other is that they merely inhabit the same earth. However, this is a topsy-turvy world, in which the real determination of objective mundane reality is the opposite of its reified appearance in that everything is connected and is in a constant state of motion3. As Engels stated ‘the whole of nature lies spread out before us as a system of inter-connections and processes (Engels 1986, 198) and even the most unlikely of things are connected such as ‘e.g., a meteorite and a man’:

If we consider two extremely different things – e.g. a meteorite and a man – in separation, we get very little out of it, at most that heaviness and other general properties of bodies are common to both. But an infinite series of other natural objects and natural processes can be put between the two things, permitting us to complete the series from meteorite to man and to allocate to each its place in the inter- connection of nature and thus to know them …’ (Engels 1986, 232/3).

A further complication has to be added to this ever-increasing complexity, is that these essential interconnecting processes of concrete reality, and particularly the organic processes of the natural world are increasingly being penetrated by societal forces in a process of

3 This dialectical perspective of the concrete world is confirmed by Marx’s own words from 1842 in which he refers to ‘the contents of the world’ as an ‘unorganised mass of the whole’ with a ‘fluid essence of the content’ Marx MECW, vol.1, 1975 page)

metabolisation. However, rarely are these socio-organic processes acknowledged as being present within concrete reality because supposedly isolated entities can only be externally related to each other as their individual anatomies are determined by internal factors only. It is impossible to find under a microscope a physical entity, which reveals bits of society fusing with organic particles.

In summary, the reason for this misguided bourgeois perspective is that society tends to perceive the concrete reality of the world as a thing-like substance and not as Engels maintains as ‘an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away.[…] for everything is fluid. (Engels, Anti-Duhring, MECW, vol.25, 21).

However, before we attempt to uncover the dialectical interconnections within climate and between the climate and the other organic processes of nature we first need to outline the empirical extent of these processes form an organic totality and how those organic processes manifest themselves on the surface of the earth/society:

We all agree that in every field of science, in natural as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material and various forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science too the interconnections are not built into the fact but to be discovered in them, …. (Engels 1986, 47)4.

Engels and Marx were very much aware of their achievement with regard to their develop- ment of dialectical materialism. However, they also warned us that this methodology in itself was not sufficient to fully understand the dialectics of nature and cultural history, as we had to have also an understanding of natural science and mathematics as Engels suggests:

Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics from Ger- man idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception of nature and his- tory. But a knowledge of mathematics and natural science is essential to a conception of nature which is dialectical and at the same time materialist. (Engels, Preface to sec- ond edition his Anti-Duhring MECW, vol.25, 11).

The reason why a knowledge of natural science and mathematics is required is because the dialectical framework reformulates the epistemological forms of mathematics and natural sci- ence rather than replacing them.

Climatic zones determining the general organic conditions of existence for societies

Engels in the following highlights another way in which humans differ from animals with regard to their relationship to the climates of the world:

Just as man learned to consume everything edible, he also learned to live in any climate. He spread over the whole of the habitable world, being the only animal fully able to do so of his own accord. The other animals that have become accustomed to

4Engels reiterated this point in his 1885 Preface to his Anti-Duhring:
And finally, to me there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of

discovering them in it and evolving them from it (Engels, 1885 Preface to his Anti-Duhring). 

all climates – domestic animals and vermin – did not become so independently, but only in the wake of man (Engels 1986, 177).

Human societies, in moving into the diverse climatic regions across the globe, were not overwhelmed by any particular climate to the extent that they were prevented from inhabiting those adverse climatic zones. They ‘learned to (adopt especially their production techniques and were as a consequence able to) live in any climate’. However, the differing types of climatic zones demanded ‘new spheres of labour’ from human societies that moved into diverse climatic regions as Engels suggests:

And the transition from the uniformly hot climate of the original home of man to colder regions, where the year was divided into summer and winter, created new requirements – shelter and clothing as protection against the cold and damp, and hence new spheres of labour, new forms of activity, which further and further separated man from the animal (Engels 1986, 177) (emphasis added).

The difference between hot and cold climates and society’s movement from the latter to the former provides a transition in the evolution of societies. The first form, ‘the original home of man’ as determined by the ‘uniformly hot climate’ naturally provided the objects of subsistence without too much effort on behalf of society. While the second form which was subsequently located in the ‘colder regions’ of the world demanded ‘new spheres of labour’ to produce the necessary physical requirements that the members of society needed to survive in these colder climate zones. Marx, in Capital, provided a more explicit categorisation of these two forms of societies with regard to the presence of differing forms of natural conditions (including the climate):

‘Even if we leave aside the question of the level of development attained by social production, the productivity of labour remains fettered by natural conditions. These conditions can all be traced back to the nature of man himself …., and to the natural objects which surround him. External natural conditions can be divided from the economic point of view into two great classes, (1) Natural wealth in the means of subsistence, i.e. a fruitful soil, waters teeming with fish, etc., and (2) natural wealth in the instruments of labour, such as waterfalls, navigable rivers, wood, metal, coal, etc. At the dawn of civilisation, it is the first class that turns the scale; at a higher stage of development, it is the second’ (Marx 1976, 647/8).

Accordingly, these natural conditions that assist society to reproduce itself materially were classified by Marx into two ‘economic’ and productive categories – societies in which nature provided its members with immediate objects of subsistence and those societies that needed to develop instruments of labour in order to provide themselves with subsistence. In the former ‘garden of Eden’ form, less labour was required for the production of physical subsistence:

‘The smaller the number of natural requirements imperatively calling for satisfaction and the greater the natural fertility of the soil and the kindness of the climate, the smaller the amount of labour-time necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the producer’ (Marx 1976, 648) (emphasis added).

But the ‘kindness of the climate’ is not solely concerned with human comfort in general as it is with whether a society needs to engage in agricultural production or not. If organic Nature is too bountiful and its climate is too comfortable and favourable there is no necessity for society to develop intensive productive activities for its own subsistence, beyond hunting and

gathering. However, if less bountiful conditions within the natural and climatic processes exist not only were productive forces developed but also out of such ‘adverse’ conditions of existence, capitalism emerged:

Where Nature is too lavish, she “keeps him in hand, like a child in leading strings”. She does not impose on him any necessity to develop himself. It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone that is the mother country of capital’ (Marx 1996, 514/5) (emphasis added)5.

The temperate climatic zone is ‘the mother country of capital’ because its natural conditions were not too lavish and this deficit in its ‘bountifulness’ spurred society on to subdue the natural conditions in order to produce products so that society could survive and in doing so industry came into being:

‘It is not the mere fertility of the soil but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes in the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which by changes in the natural surroundings spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capabilities, his means and modes of labour. It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economising, of appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the work of man’s hand, that first plays the decisive part in the history of industry’ (Marx 1996, 515) (emphasis added).

What Marx is proposing here is that there is an apparent ecological reason for the rise of Capitalism in the West in which the inherent climatic conditions were neither too favourable as to be lavishly bountiful nor too unfavourable to be adverse for agricultural cultivation. Consequently, the climatic constraints of the temperate zone, ‘spurred on’ those inhabiting societies to toil with the forces of nature by appropriating them for societal production purposes. In this tremendous ecological effort to subdue nature, that capitalism was eventually born.

However, the analysis of the prevailing climatic conditions of existence within the earth’s climatic zones has to be superseded by an investigation into the specific operations of the diverse organic processes of the climate and how they metabolise not only with each other but also with the other organic processes of nature. To do this we need to move theanalysis away from the examination of the global aspects of the earth’s climatic zone system to an investigation into the particulars of a local weather system. Within this system, the atmospheric climate becomes an aspect and condition of existence for the localised weather system. This is so because we need to explicate its interpenetrating relationships of climates’

5Marx included the following footnote from J. Massie to highlight these climatic consequences:

‘There are no two countries which furnish an equal number of necessaries of life in equal plenty, and with the same quantity of labour. Men’s wants increase or diminish with the severity or temperateness of the climate they live in, consequently, the proportion of trade which the inhabitants of different countries are obliged to carry on through necessity cannot be the same nor is it practicable to ascertain the degree of variation further than by the degree of Heat and Cold: from whence one may make this general conclusion, that the quantity of labour required for a certain number of people is greatest in cold climates, and least in hot ones for in the former men not only want more clothes, but the earth[need] more cultivating than in the latter’ (An Essay on the Governing Causes of the Natural Rate of Interest – London, 1730) (emphasis added).

metabolising processes and with the other organic processes of nature that are ‘grounded’ within the physical surfaces of the earth. In addition, because of these constantly changing diverse processes of climate we have to examine them in detail within a particular bioregion. The region I have chosen is Ireland and specifically Engels in-depth analysis of its ‘natural conditions’, including its climate and weather system6.

1. Marx establishes a dichotomy between climate and labour and their ability to induce fertility of the soil.2. Climatic zones determines society’s wants for necessities, e.g., food, clothing and shelter. 3. Climate therefore is one crucial determinant in the division of labour between trading

societies.4. Less favourable or bountiful climatic conditions spurs societies on to produce what climate does not provide organically.

Engels on Irish weather: How the ‘heavy Atlantic rain clouds’ metabolises with the Irish geological processes

Engels begins his analysis of the climate of Ireland by suggesting that the dominant determinant of the overall process of Irish weather conditions is its position with regard to the Gulf Stream:

Ireland’s climate is determined by her position. The Gulf Stream and the prevailing south-west winds provide warmth and make for mild winters and cool summers (Marx and Engels 1971, 183).

Although this Atlantic warm current has a moderating effect on Irish temperatures, the prevailing winds also function in this regard. Accordingly, the mildness of the climate is determined by the interaction of the warmth of the Gulf Stream with the prevailing westerly winds as Engels suggests in the following:

Prevailing winds were west and south-west, then came north-west and south-east, and most rarely north-east and east. In summer, autumn and winter west and south-west prevail. East is more frequent in spring and summer, when it occurs as frequently as in autumn and winter; north-east is most frequent in spring when it occurs twice as frequent as in autumn and winter. As a result of this, the temperatures are more even, the winters milder and the summers cooler than in London, while on the other hand the air is damper’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 186) (emphasis added).

The consequence of this particular form of mildness is the ever-present ‘dampness of the air’, which is also a consequence of its westerly position as ‘Ireland also suffers the first powerful downpour of the heavy Atlantic rain clouds (Marx and Engels 1971, 184). It is so damp that salt, sugar or flour left out in an unheated room will soak the dampness out of the air (Marx and Engels 1971, 186/7). Ireland’s average rainfall is at least 35 inches, which is considerably more than England’s average (Marx and Engels 1971, 184). But as Engels continues:

6Engels chapter entitled ‘Natural Conditions’ of his unfinished work – the History of Ireland (Marx and Engels, 1971).

‘In spite of this the Irish climate is decidedly pleasanter than the English. The leaden sky which often causes days of continual drizzle in England is mostly replaced in Ireland by a continental April sky; the fresh sea-breezes bring on clouds quickly and unexpectedly, but drive them past equally quickly, if they do not come down immediately in sharp showers. The weather, like the inhabitants, has a more acute character, it moves in sharper, more sudden contrasts; ….; here also rain and sunshine succeed each other suddenly and unexpectedly and there is none of the grey Englishboredom’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 184).

The difference between the weather systems of Britain and Ireland is not determined by the amount of rain that falls but ‘how and when it falls’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 185). The ‘how and when’ of the Irish rainfall is apparently determined by how ‘the fresh sea-breezes bring on clouds quickly and unexpectedly drive them past equally quickly, if they do not come down immediately in sharp showers’. Thus, the specific form of Irish rainfall is the determining essential climatic process of this organic totality. The constant fleeting nature of rain showers – is the ‘active middle’ process7 of this Irish weather system and consequently it determines simultaneously its mildness and dampness:

‘…there are seldom more than two or three consecutive dry days in summer; and in late autumn it is fine again. Very dry summers are rare and dearth never occurs is because of draught but mostly because of too much rain’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 186).

This succinctly captures the essential and dominating determinant of the Irish weather system, its incessant rain all year-round rain that is not just caused by passing rain clouds but clouds that interact with other organic processes of the topographical kind. The specific form of a weather system is essentially a complex matrix of dialectical relationships that are a result of metabolising organic processes. These are initially identified, within the medium of the atmosphere. Nevertheless, these apparently atmospheric moments of climate are by necessity earth bound. Since the climate/weather system does not operate in a void – even an atmospheric one – they have to form relationships with the physical surfaces of the earth. Moreover, in doing so the climatic processes of the earth metabolises with the geological processes of that same earth. The specific way they in the local context metabolise is best identified in concept of the local weather system.

In geological terms, Ireland is shaped like a saucer with a central plain encircled by a mountain chain, which hugs its coastal perimeter. This plain, ‘the foundation of the whole of Ireland consists of the massive bed of limestone’ was formed during the Carboniferous period (Marx and Engels 1971, 172). Engels continues:

The centre of Ireland, to the north and south of a line from Dublin to Galway, forms a wide plain rising to 100-300 feet above sea-level. This plain, the foundation so to say of the whole of Ireland, consists of the massive bed of limestone (Carboniferous limestone), … In the south and the north, this plain is encircled by a mountain chain,

7 The inner construction of modern society, or, capital in the totality of its relations, is therefore posited in the economic relations of modern landed property, which appears as a process; ground rent – capital – wage labour (the form of the circle can be put the another way; as wage-labour – capital – ground rent; but capital must always appear as the active middle (Marx, Grundrisse, p.276) (emphasis added).

which extends mainly along the coast, and consists almost entirely of older rock- formations, which have broken through the limestone (Marx and Engels 1971, 172).

These geological formations have created an unusual physical configuration8 and especially in the central plain as Engels explains:

While the mountains are mainly along the coast, the watersheds between the inland river basins are mostly low-lying, and therefore the rivers are incapable of carrying all the rainwater out to the sea. Thus, extensive peat bogs arise inland, especially on the watersheds (Marx and Engels 1971, 182).

In addition, the reason why these inland peat bogs have emerged is how the low-lying geological base has metabolised with the rainfall:

In the plain alone 1,576,000 acres are covered with peat bogs. These are largely depressions or troughs in the land, most of which were once shallow lake basins, which were gradually overgrown with moss and march plants and were filled up with their decomposing remains (Marx and Engels 1971, 182).

Thus, the westerly blown rain clouds have metabolised with the central plain’s geological structure to create a particular weather system that has subsequently allowed the great peat bogs of inland Ireland to emerge. The crucial point to emphasise here is that both aspects of this metabolising climatic process – the excessive rainfall and low-lying nature of the plain with its physical depressions and troughs – form essential metabolising moments of that process. However, elsewhere and beyond the confines of midland bogs, limestone again occurs but because this particular bedrock is not as low-lying as the central plain, it metabolises with the rainfall in a diametrically opposing way:

The limestone is known to be full of cracks and fissures, which let the excess water through quickly (Marx and Engels 1971, 185).

Accordingly, the particular geological aspect of this limestone bedrock does not encourage peat bog to grow but it crucially absorbs the excessive dampness by allowing the incessant rainwater to pass uninterrupted into the ‘bowels of the earth’. However, it is not just the permeability of the limestone bedrock that allows cultivation to continue but also the presence of stony soil lying on that sieve-like base:

At the same time, he (Arthur Young) points out that the soil of Ireland counteracts this dampness of the climate. It is generally stony, and for this reason lets the water through more easily (Marx and Engels 1971, 185)

Therefore, both the limestone bedrock and the stony soil function as a metabolising process that naturally lessens the effects of excessive rainfall and the inherent dampness associated with Irish weather system.

8Sweeney elaborates on the uniqueness of this physical structure:

Ireland also has its own distinctive geographical climate fingerprint. This results from what is an unusual physical configuration for an island of its size, comprising of a mountainous perimeter of hard ancient rocks and relatively soft, low-lying interior. This combined with the fretted coastline of the west and south provides a surprisingly varied climatic mosaic to the island (John Sweeney, 2011:2).

However, this type of metabolising relationship between rain/wind and the geological processes can dramatically change when the geological entities encountered also changes. For example, when the climatic processes of wind driven rain sweep over mountain ranges rather than rolling across low-lying plains the consequence can be a dramatic change in rainfall. For example, on the western mountains the ‘annual rainfall totals over 3 metres, these gave way to values as low as 710 mm’ (Sweeney 2001, 2) in the mid-lands and along its eastern seaboard. Moreover, this difference in weather conditions, between the mountainous edge of the island and its internal low-lying valleys is also reflected in the number of storms occurring. Fifty days on average of gale force winds can be experienced in the typical year on the north-west coast; this reduces to only two in the sheltered inland valleys of the southeast (Sweeney 2011, 2).

So, it is not just the volatile organic processes of the atmosphere but also by how those dynamic forces metabolise with the solid geological processes of the earth that constitute the essential overall form of the Irish weather system. Both processes metabolise with each other to become essential moments of the local weather system.

However, when the organic processes of the Irish climate metabolise with the geological structures of the island, they also by necessity metabolise with the flora that naturally cover those structures. Thus, the type of flora that acts as a mantel over the geological base is very much determined by how the predominant determinant of rainfall of the weather system metabolises with the particular geological entities within differing bioregions of Ireland. As Engels, has highlighted in Ireland’s central plain peat bog is the dominant flora but in the rest of the low-lying terrains of the island, it is grass:

‘Arthur Young considers that Ireland is considerably damper than England; this is the cause of the amazing grass-bearing qualities of the soil’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 185).

However, it is not the amount of rain that falls that differentiates the grass growing ability of England and Ireland but crucially how that rainfall metabolises with the inherent permeable condition of the Irish soil (and its geological bedrock) contrasted with the impermeable conditions of the English clay soils as Engels suggests in quoting Arthur Young:

‘If as much rain fell upon the clays of England (a soil very rarely met with in Ireland, and never without much stone) falls upon the rocks of her sister-island, those lands could not be cultivated. But the rocks clothed with verdure; – those of limestone with only a thin covering of mold, have the softest and the most beautiful turf imaginable’ (Arthur Young, vol.2, Part 11, pp.3-4).

Moreover, this grass growing ability is not just a natural consequence of metabolising organic processes but it is also a result of being a consciously sown field crop – one that has been cultivated by the human activity (Slater, 2013). Therefore, unlike Young’s inherent naturalism in the above quotation, in which it is conceived as a one-sided determination, in fact grass is a multi-sided phenomenon and consequently it is a concrete manifestation of the concentration of social and natural determinations. In a very real sense, it is the unity of diverse determinations. Within agricultural cultivation, the ‘tillers of the soil’ appropriate the inherent organic processes of the Irish weather system, which includes the atmospheric forces, geological aspects and the constituents of the soil, transforming them into natural agents of production.

5. The Gulf Stream and prevailing south-west winds determine that Ireland has a damp climate.

This dampness is caused by incessant rain and which is itself determined by constantly moving rain clouds.Accordingly, the amount of rain that falls is very much determined by how those rain clouds interact with the topographical structures.What determines the weather system is the interconnections that occur between that system and the diverse topographical processes,When the Irish climatic process metabolize with the geological structures they necessarily metabolise with the organic flora that naturally cover those structures.Flora like grass is not exclusively determined by the weather system and the other

organic forces of fertility but by how it is a sown crop – sown by society.

Marx on how the organic processes of climate become natural agents of production

In Marx’s discussion of ‘Differential Rent 1’ in vol.3 of Capital, he begins his discussion of soil fertility by noting that with regard to the soil itself it is the chemical constituents that appear to be the dominant determinant in the formation of natural fertility. Yet this innate ‘causation’ only comes into being when the climate conditions are suspended:

‘Apart from climatic and similar aspects, differences in natural fertility are differences in the chemical compositions of the soil, i.e. variations in the amount of nutrient elements for plants it contains’ (Marx 1981, 790)9.

The implication of setting the ‘climatic factors’ aside is that they must have a significant impact on soil fertility as well as its chemical composition. Moreover, what is also important to highlight is that the climatic relationship to the soil is an external one, where the climate has a direct ‘impacting’ relationship on the soil and not just providing an environmental backdrop to the inner mechanics of the soil10. The sun as an essential moment of the climate process has such an external relationship to the plants of the soil:

‘The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – awaking …just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-

9Marx quotes Kirchhoff making the same point:

‘….. since fertility does not just depend on the quality of the soil, but also on the year’s weather…’ (Marx, quoting Kirchhoff, vol.2.325).

10‘A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective thing. A being which is not itself an objective for some third being has no being for its object, i.e., it is not objectively related. Its’ being is not objective’ (Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, pp.180-183).

awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power’ (Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, pp.180-182).

Therefore, this particular ‘indispensable’ aspect of the climate – the sun – has the essential function in Nature as the ‘essential power’ that is ‘life-awaking’. The soil is not soil, or at least fertile soil, without its indispensable relationship to the immediate weather system, as this later process provides the motive power for vegetative growth in the soil. Therefore, the functioning soil – functioning to be fertile – is not determined exclusively by the internal constituents of the soil but by its intricate and diverse relationships between those constituents and the mediating weather system. Accordingly, the soil and its inherent essential processes form with the local weather system an organic totality of metabolising processes. The wholeness of the soil’s organic totality is not exclusively retained within the physicalcontours of its thing-like appearance – terra firma – but by its interpenetrating relationships with a constantly changing matrix of metabolising processes, some within the soil and others without. This particular dialectical insight challenges the ability of our sense perception to uncover the workings of concrete reality since we tend to perceive that reality as being made up of isolated and self-contained entities – a reified world – while in fact according to Engels, it is essentially dialectical.

Marx in his discussion of Russian agriculture reiterated the beneficial aspect of weather system on nature, in this case of crop harvests and as we cultivate the soil, we simultaneously appropriate the forces of the climate that affects the soil:

‘Good harvests [which favourable weather conditions sometimes draw from the land] are matched by periods of famine’ (Marx in his draft letter to Vera Zasulich quoted by Shanin p.115).

Here, the weather conditions are conceptualised in such way that they are not about providing a mere atmospheric layer for plant growth but they are conceptualised by Marx to be a forceful catalyst in crop production as they ‘draw’ the harvest ‘from the land’11. However, it is not just ‘favourable weather conditions’ alone that ‘fortuitously induce’ good harvests from the soil, we also have to include society’s attempt to improve the soil as Marx indicates in the following:

‘A general increase in the fertility of the land resulting from improvements presupposes these conditions, as against the fertility fortuitously induced by a favourable season’ (Marx to Engels -7th Jan. 1852, Collected Works, Letters, vol. 38:261).

Therefore, Marx appears to be unfolding a conceptual perspective in which natural factors such as climate metabolise with society’s attempt to cultivate the soil in order to produce organic products for society’s use. And in doing so the natural conditions become agents of production as Marx states in the following with regard to natural conditions pertaining to the

11However, the possible existence of famine conditions also suggests that these weather conditions can have a detrimental effect on the harvest. If we exclude the possibility of the famine conditions caused by human strife, we appear to have a determination of a devastating collapse of a harvest due to natural conditions – a diseased crop such as occurred during either the Great Irish Famine or adverse weather conditions causing dearth. Either way, natural conditions, including climate, play a critical role in crop production.

motive forces of flowing water in a water-fall but the same holds true for climatic conditions (remembering that flowing water is somewhere and sometime a consequence of rain clouds):

‘In the first instance, to a natural force, the motive force of water-power which is provided by nature itself and is not a product of labour… It is a natural agent of production, and no labour goes into creating it. But this is not all. [….] . It (the increased productivity of labour) arises from the greater natural productivity of a labour linked with the use of a natural force, but a natural force that is not available to all capital in the same sphere of production, as is for example the elasticity of steam; its use therefore does not automatically occur as soon as capital is invested in this sphere’ (Marx 1981, 782). (Emphasis added)

Therefore, the motive force of nature does play a role in the production process of cultivation as it functions as a natural agent of production. The ‘increased productivity of labour’ is determined by the presence of natural processes that operate within the immediate locality of the production process. Those motive forces of nature when they physically enter the production process metabolise with the labour power of the producer, thus making that labour power more productive. The ‘harnessing’ of the weather as a natural agent of production is a necessary aspect of agricultural production – past, present and the future. Even in the developed economies of the temperate climatic zone, the growing period of field crops is very much restricted by the seasons and ever-changing fortunes of the weather within those seasons:

‘In our temperate climates, the land brings forth grain once a year. The shortening or lengthening of the production period (an average of nine months for winter sowing) is itself dependent on the alteration of good and bad years, and hence cannot be precisely determined in advance and controlled, as in industry proper’ (Marx 1978, 318) (emphasis added).

Marx’s final comment highlights an important conceptual trend in his attempt to understand the specific structure of agricultural production and that in contrast to the ‘workings’ of the industrial labour process, the agricultural production process is dependent on the vicissitudes of the local weather system. In this constant attempt to bring ‘a natural force under the control of society, of economising, of appropriating or subduing it’ society according to Marx will never ‘master’ the organic processes of nature as it has done in the inorganic processes of the industrial labour processes12:

‘[….] capitalist production has not yet succeeded, and never will succeed in mastering these processes [i.e. organic processes] in the same way as it has mastered purely mechanical or inorganic chemical processes’ (Marx [1861-1863] 1976 82; 1809 – quoted from Roth ‘Marx on technical change’ 2010, p.1243).

What Marx and Engels appear to be conceptually unfolding is that nature and its complex range of diverse processes can never be totally mastered by society, they can only be appropriated and thus given a social form that enhance their productive capabilities for agricultural cultivation. Climatic factors and their essential processes that determine those

12 Marx states that: Agriculture forms a mode of production sui generis, because the organic process is involved in addition to the mechanical and chemical process, and the natural reproduction process is merely controlled and guided… .(Marx, 1973, p.726).

factors are similarly utilised by the way they are integrated into society’s processes of cultivation.

Nevertheless, these forces of nature when they are appropriated into a labour process can also be enhanced and thereby making labour even more productive as Marx suggests with regard to a waterfall:

A waterfall can be artificially channelled to make its motive powerfully usable; a water-wheel can be improved in order to use as much of this water-power as possible where the ordinary type of wheel is not suited to the supply of water, turbines can be used etc., (Marx, 1981,784).

With regard to enhancing the weather process within cultivation, it is not concerned with changing the internal dynamics of that atmospheric climatic processes but changing with what they impact upon, that is the topographical aspects that it metabolises with and doing so changing the entire workings of the organic totality of cultivation. If the predominant determinant of local weather system is rain – excessive rain, the cultivators could harness this rain and simultaneously reduce its excessiveness by developing soil drainage systems.

Therefore, it should be stressed that the crucial difference between the inorganic industrial production process and the organic agricultural production process is the determining presence of climate as dominant natural agent of production within agriculture. An excellent example of this natural determination within the cultivation process of agriculture is Marx’s commentary on Russia’s adverse winter climatic conditions compressing agricultural production into a very short growing season:

‘Thus, the more unfavourable the climate, the more the agricultural working period, and hence the outlay of capital and labour, is compressed into a short interval, as for example Russia. ‘In some of the northern districts, field labour is only possible during from 130 to 150 days in the course of the year….’ (Marx 1978, 318)13.

Consequently, what we need to be aware of is that in appropriating the natural processes of a waterfall or climate in the cultivation process we must recognise the independently determined forces of those organic processes of nature and their autonomy from societal interference. In the following, Marx recognises the independent powers of Nature embedded in the earth and how they combine with the ‘powers given by human industry’:

…the earth is the reservoir, from whose bowels the use-values are to be torn. […] The soil has no ‘indestructible’ powers. […] By ‘original’ powers of the land we understand here those, which it possesses independently of the action of human industry, although, on the other hand, the powers given to it by human industry, became just as much its (245) original powers as those given to it by the process of nature (246). (Theories of Surplus Value, part 2) (Emphasis added).

13Marx quoted the following: ‘The number of working days for the three main working periods is assumed to be as follows in the different districts of Germany, with respect to the climatic and other conditions involved: the spring period from mid-March or the beginning of April up to middle of May, 50-60 days; the summer period from early June to late August, 65-80 days; the autumn period from early September or to the or the end of October or the middle of November, 55-75 days. As far as winter goes, there is simply the work suited to that period, such as haulage of fertilizer, wood, goods for the market, building materials, etc., F. Kirchhoff – (Marx 1978, 318).

In fact, since we cannot produce them in an industrial production process all we can do to them in agricultural production is to provide them with is a particular trajectory – a social form14.

Climate is an essential element of soil to such an extent that as we cultivate the soil we simultaneously appropriate the organic forces of the immediate climatic conditions.Climate is therefore an indispensable aspect of cultivation as it provides the ‘life- awakening’ force of soil fertility – vegetative growth.By appropriating the organic forces of climate within the cultivation process, those

natural forces become natural agents of the agricultural production process.14. Accordingly, since we cannot control the specific forces of climate, we can never master the organic forces involved in cultivation.15. But we can enhance these climatic forces by manipulating what they impact upon.

Engels on appropriating the Irish weather system as the essential natural agent of cultivation

On a number of occasions throughout his chapter on Ireland, Engels highlights why he is investigating these natural conditions, which includes its climate:

And indeed the climate only concerns us here insofar as it is important for agriculture (Marx and Engels 1971, 185).

This research problematic is not determined by the mere empirical presence of these entities within the same bioregion but by how they dialectically metabolise with each other as processes. Again, they form a complex relationship, which was characterised by how climate in general and the Irish weather system in particular are appropriated by Irish agricultural production processes in diverse ways. If this form of appropriation is done properly, the results can be spectacular as Engels quotes Wakefield:

‘The soil of Ireland is so fertile, and the climate so favourable, under a proper system of agriculture, it will produce not only a sufficiency of corn for its own use, but a

14Therefore, in the everyday activities of cultivation human confrontation with nature gives a form to nature’s complex material processes, as the following indicates:

Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials’ (Marx, 1976, 284) (emphasis added).

And:

The two essential characteristics of the physical product of the labour are its form and substance in the labour process. The latter is provided by nature and the form by society and ‘this humanistic form is temporary and accidental compared with natural substances’ (Han 2010 :2)

  

The product of the process is a use-value, a piece of natural material adapted to human needs by means of a change in its form (Marx, 1976, 287) (emphasis added).

 

superabundance which may be ready at all times to relieve England when she may stand in need of assistance’ (Wakefield vol. 2, p.61).

In the context of our analysis of climate, the ‘proper system of agriculture’ must relate to how that climate process is successfully integrated into the process of Irish cultivation. This involves both the content and the form of cultivation and how they respond to the diverse moments of the localised climate process – the Irish weather system. As we have already uncovered the Irish weather according to Arthur Young ‘is the cause of the amazing grass- bearing qualities of the soil’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 185), but this is not sufficient in itself as it needs to ‘metabolise’ with the permeable structures of the soil and its limestone bedrock (Slater, 2017). Although this particular metabolic relationship appears to intensify the growth of grass, it does not hinder the growth of corn:

‘…, nowhere does he (Wakefield) state that it (climate) provides a serious obstacle to the cultivation of corn. In fact, he finds, as we shall see, that the losses incurred during the wet harvest times are due to entirely different causes, and states so quite explicitly’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 188) (my inclusion in brackets).

The inherent variability of Irish weather is not just determined by passing rain-carrying clouds but as we have pointed out how they metabolize with the diverse geological formations of the island. Due cognisance of these particular metabolising moments should be taken into account with regard to the contents of the crops grown within the diverse bio- geological regions of Ireland:

Of course these are the regions, in which because of proximity of mountains the rainfall is always greater, and which are less suited for wheat-growing – notably in the south and west. [….] Ireland’s principal grain was and still is oats. […] And in any case, oats can take a considerable amount of rain (Marx and Engels 1971, 189).

Although these damp conditions affect grain production it has not stopped grain being sown as ‘Ireland has grown corn since ancient times’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 188).15 Nevertheless, the particular type of grain grown is very much rain determined – oats:

Ireland’s principal grain was and still is oats. In 1810, no less than 10 times as much oats as of other sorts of corn put together (Marx and Engels 1971, 189).

When the rain-dominated weather system metabolises with high mountains what is generally sustainable is oats and not wheat unless the rain determination on the grain crop is curbed if not eliminated by societal intervention strategies. One strategy adopted, which has already been highlighted by Engels, that is to minimise the dominant determinant of rain in the agricultural process is of course to plant more rain resistant crops, such as potatoes, rather than the other grain species e.g. wheat. Another strategy adopted was to engage in the post- cultivation activity of extracting the dampness from the grain by drying it, as Engels quotes Wakefield in the following:

15Engels continued:

‘After the English invasion, the cultivation of corn diminished because of continual battles…. If Ireland were not suited to the cultivation of corn, would it have been grown for over a thousand years?’ (Marx and Engels 1971, 189).

Even in summer, salt, sugar, flour, etc., soak dampness out of the air, and corn must be kiln-dried, (Wakefield, vol. 1: 172-81).

Apparently, kiln drying was ’a practice unknown in some parts of England (Engels 1971, 186). The most used strategy to overcome the threat from excessive rain was to increase vigilance at harvest time, which Engels suggests by quoting Patterson:

‘If frequent summer and autumn showers make our hay and corn harvests risky, then vigilance and diligence would be just as successful in such exigencies as they are for the English in their ‘catching’ harvests, and improved cultivation would ensure that the seed-corn would aid the peasants’ efforts’ (W. Patterson, An Essay on the climate of Ireland, Dublin, 1804:164).

However, the most effective way that the majority of the peasant cultivators in the Pre-famine period dealt with excessive rainfall was to engage with ridge cultivation using spade husbandry16.

The critical aspect of the productiveness of Irish crop production is how society was able to deal with the predominate determinant of the constant dampness of the Irish weather system. This is concerned with how the organic countertendencies of the indigenous geological processes can counteract the inherent dampness of the weather system and how these powerful organic forces are themselves augmented by the social forms of cultivation. Choosing the right crop for the particular climatic zone was a necessary requirement in this regard. However, on the other hand, climate in general and the weather in particular are never just given entities with unchanging characteristics, they, on the contrary, are fluid and dynamic processes with diverse forces that need to be appropriated in a production process as natural agents of production. But this necessary appropriation is not always successful, in certain seasons the weather can actually damage the crop output.

The form of cultivation adopted to productively cope with the vicissitudes of the local weather system was not discussed in detail by Engels in this chapter. However, what was discussed was how the British colonialists and some of their ideological prize-fighters17 claimed that the majority of the Irish peasantry should be removed from the land to make way for livestock production as determined by the propensity of the damp climate to produce grass pasture:

From Mela to Goldwin Smith18 and up to the present day, how often has this assertion been repeated – since 1846, especially by a noisy chorus of Irish landowners – that Ireland is condemned by her climate to provide not Irishmen with bread but English men with meat and butter, and that the destiny of the Irish people is, therefore, to be

16Not only is the seedbed raised above the water table, but the trench serves as a drainage channel…. The ridges allow the soil to be warmed from the sides as well as the top and they were, moreover sloped to catch the maximum sun (Evans 1992, 40).

17 For a discussion of Marx’s work on colonial Ireland see Slater (2018b)
18Engels stated the following in footnote: Goldwin Smith, Irish History and Irish Character, Oxford and London, 1861.

– What is more than amazing in this work, which, under the mask of “objectivity”, justifies English policy in Ireland, the ignorance of the professor of history, or the hypocrisy of the liberal bourgeois? We shall touch on both again later brought over the ocean to make room in Ireland for cows and sheep! (Marx and Engels 1971, 185) (emphasis added).

The reason why this was proposed was the existence, in the context of Ireland (and Britain in comparison to France), of a comparative advantage for grass pasture rather than tillage cultivation as determined by its distinctive wet climate:

Compared with England, Ireland is more suited to cattle rearing on the whole; but if England is compared with France, she too is more suited to cattle-rearing (Marx and Engels 1971, 190).

The problem with the comparative advantage framework is that of overemphasising how one particular climatically determined crop has an organic advantage over other sown crops between regions or countries as determined by differing climatic conditions. In doing so however, it fails to recognise how within specific regions there are always coexisting microclimates that can counter the generalized dominant crop condition as proposed by the comparative advantage framework. Engels suggests this critical point in the following:

If one looks at the matter impartially and without being misled by the cries of the interested parties, …….., one finds that Ireland like all other places, has some parts which because of the soil and climate are more suited to cattle-rearing, and others to tillage, and still others – the vast majority – which are suited for both (Marx and Engels 1971, 190).

This type of over-generalising assertion, endemic in the comparative advantage framework, is very much a one-sided form of conceptualisation as it emphasises one determinate from a diverse array of many that determine the organic totality of cultivation. Accordingly, it leads to not only bad science (both natural and economic) but also it fails to take into account the practical necessity known to all ‘tillers of the soil’ that cropping has to include rotation systems in order to break the disease cycle associated with certain crops. Thus, ‘non- advantaged’ crops have to be sown as much as ‘advantaged’ crops if cultivation is to continue. However, in order to cultivate tillage crops including grass it was necessary to clear the native and natural vegetation, usually primeval forestry, so that cultivated crops could be planted. In doing so, society created the potential to change certain aspects of the local weather system.

16. The appropriation of the Irish weather system as a natural agent of production has

to include its ability to metabolise with topographical moments,The effect of dominant determinant of incessant rain was dampness can itself be determined by these topographical moments. High mountains intensify rainfall, while the sieve-like limestone absorbs it and the hallow lakes of the midlands retain it within their peat bogs.The diverse moments of the Irish weather system consist of not only of the atmospheric forces that circle the earth and the island’s geological structures but also the vegetative land cover that naturally overlays those physical structures.The ‘apparent’ naturalism’ of the Irish weather system and its determination of particular vegetative growth can not only be appropriated but also enhanced in the process of cultivation.

Climate change as determined by changing the vegetative land cover system

Engels in the following succinctly summaries the extent of humanity’s’ impact on the diverse aspects of the earth:

There is devilishly little left of “nature” … The earth’s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and human beings themselves have indefinitely changed, and all this owing to human activity, (Engels 1986, 231)

This ability of human society to transform life on earth and the physical aspects of that earth itself is not just confined to the past but as Marx suggests ‘climate and flora change in historical times’ (Marx to Engels, 25th March, 1868, CW 42, 1987:558). Nature has been and continues to be changed by society and consequently in doing so creating new ‘organic’ conditions of existence for humanity and all other life forms that exist on earth. In addition, the transformation of the earth’s ‘climate and flora’ is not a coincidence but they form ‘an endless maze of relations and interactions’ (Engels anti-duhring:) not only between themselves but also with human society as society appropriates them in the process of cultivation. Much of this societal induced change is not only spatially extensive but also inherently destructive:

‘Man destroys it [vegetation of a locality] in order to sow field crops on the soil thus released, or to plant trees or vines which he knows will yield many times the amount sown. He transfers useful plants and domestic animals from one country to another and thus changes the flora, fauna of whole continents.’ (Engels 1986, 178).

Thus, all of nature until the end of life on earth is changed, by the hand of society even the climatic conditions are altered:

‘Man alone has succeeded in impressing his stamp on nature, not only by so altering the aspect and climate of his dwelling-place, and even the plants and animals themselves, that the consequences of his activity can disappear only with the general extinction of the terrestrial globe’ (Engels 1986, 34) (emphasis added).

This destructive transformation of organic nature is done because humanity needs the diverse forces of nature to reproduce itself physically. In essence, societies down through the ages were not just passively adapting to the organic productiveness of nature but were in fact always attempting to harness its diverse motive forces as a way of enhancing its cultivation capabilities. Consequently, the form in which the climatic factors impacts on the soil and its plant life is fundamentally changed by society, when for example, society replaces the original and the organic forms of vegetation of a locality with a social form of field crops. In short, a natural ecosystem of biodiversity is displaced by a socially determined agroecosystem of monocrops, which often in its wake causes climate change at a micro level. A good example of such a microclimate change is when a forest is cut down and thus the effect of climate on the earth’s surface can be profound. If the dominant determinant of the weather system is extensive sunshine with its intense heat, eliminating the tree canopy and its shading qualities, which traps moisture beneath, could cause the top soil to dry up and blow away in a process of desertification. In turn, this would establish new structural moments in the local weather system. Engels identifies some historical examples of ecological catastrophes, as determined by human induced climate change, in the following:

The people, who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present state of those countries. (Engels 1986, 180).

In removing the tree cover, they removed critical moments of the local climate system associated with the ‘reservoirs of moisture’ and thereby changed the ecological bases of those bioregions. In discussing Fraas’ book, Marx reiterates the same point but also suggests how to deal with these disastrous climatic consequences of deforestation in a socialist context by consciously controlling it:

He (Fraas) claims that the cultivation – depending on its degree – the moisture’ so beloved by the peasants gets lost (hence also the plants migrate from south to north), and finally devastating through deforestation, etc. …The conclusion is that cultivation – when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled 19(as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point) – leaves deserts behind it, Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece. (Marx to Engels, 25, March, 1868, MECW, vol. 42, 557).

Consequently, when deforestation takes place and cultivation ‘proceeds in natural growth’ – without due consideration for its ecological consequences this can lead to the process of desertification. What appears to be critical in the forest functioning as a land-cover is that its canopy apparently creates the essential condition for an internal microclimate to emerge in which moisture is retained under the canopy.

However, the consequence of such disastrous vegetative change in the land cover terms is not just the ‘desertification’ of plant life but also the ‘desertification’ of the weather system itself, where in the above historical examples, the removal of the forest’s vegetation also got rid of the ‘reservoirs of moisture’ and thereby causing the drying up of the climate of these regions. This acted as a further catalyst to the overall process of desertification. Historically, society has changed the climate of the earth – the localised weather system – by changing the vegetative land cover. Often, within in this matrix of metabolising processes, societies have used grazing animals, and their natural propensity to graze low-lying vegetation, to change the vegetative land cover of a chosen location, as Engels continues:

We have seen how goats have prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece20; on the island of St. Helena goats and pigs brought in by the first arrivals have succeeded in exterminating its old vegetation almost completely, and so have prepared the ground for the spreading of plants brought by later sailors and colonists (Engels 1986, 178).

Engels also highlights how humans change not only the immediate environment through cultivation but that changed environment can subsequently change human society:

Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who have made them (Engels 1986, 178) (emphasis added).

19It appears that Marx is referring to socialist planning where there will be scientific understanding of the remote consequences of such destructive ecological activity and attempt to avoid it, yet still engage in cultivation. 20Engels stated that: ‘the goats in Greece that eat away the young bushes before they grow to maturity, have eaten bare all the mountains of the country’. (Engels 1886, 175)

Thus, changing the climate as determined by deforestation changes in turn not only the immediate environmental conditions but also these transformed ecological conditions impact back on how society is physically able to sustain itself. In this changed environmental context, the local inhabitants may have to transform themselves from being, for example, forest dwellers into being desert nomads. The essential point to be stressed here is that when the induced changes in the environment impact back on the ‘inducers’ and it – this ecological transformation – crucially changes them as well. According to Engels, it is necessary to highlight this dialectical relationship in order to avoid falling into naturalism:

The naturalistic conception of history, … as if nature exclusively reacts on man, and natural conditions everywhere exclusively determined his historical development, is therefore one-sided and forgets that man also reacts on nature, changing it and creating new conditions of existence for himself (Engels 1986, 231) (emphasis added).

However, if on the other hand, the dominant organic process of the localised weather system is heavy rainfall, cutting down the forest and removing the tree canopy can give rise to severe soil erosion leading to, in extreme circumstances, the washing away of the top soil as Marx suggests in the following:

What cared the Spanish planters of Cuba, who burnt down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very profitable coffee trees – what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind bare rock! (Marx and Engels, CW, vol.25, 463).

The immediate consequence of this particular act of deforestation, was the growth of ‘highly profitable coffee trees’ but the remote and unintended consequences were those associated with the process of desertification, which were apparently not foreseen by these Spanish ‘tillers of the soil’ and therefore ‘not consciously controlled’. They sought the ‘most tangible result’ of badly needed and locally sourced fertilizer for their coffee plantations. The remote consequences were caused by the continuing presence of the ‘tropical rainfall’ metabolising with a changing form of vegetative land cover. Thus, the initial burning of the trees and the subsequent removal of the protective tree canopy meant that the tropical rainfall was now metabolising with weaker forms of vegetative land cover, which eventually failed to protect the soil from being washed away by the seasonal tropical rains. These latter events as remote consequences were determined by the continuing metabolising of the remaining organic processes that were slowly changing. Finally reaching a point (currently known as a tipping point) when a number of aspects and conditions of existence of the original metabolising processes were eliminated – the vegetative land cover and the soil that originally supported that land cover. The difference therefore between the immediate and the remote consequences is that the initial intervention was that of the removal of the phenomenal form of the tree canopy – the immediate consequence – was simultaneously a thwarting of the ‘abstract’ metabolising processes, that eventually over time led to the remote consequences, associated with desertification. Therefore, that same action of wrenching of a concrete object21 from its immediate environment also eliminated that physical moment from its functional role it

21Ilyenkov argued that Marx perceived any individual entity as essentially a moment within a process: ‘That means that any individual object, thing, phenomenon, or fact is given a certain concrete form of its existence by the concrete process in the movement of which it happens to be involved;….’(Ilyenkov 1982, 118)

performed within the matrix of metabolising organic processes. In removing this relational interconnection, in which that original canopy was functioning as an essential moment in the reproduction of that local Cuban weather system, the metabolising operations of the organic processes of this system became so completely transformed, that the remaining organic processes could not re-establish the forestry nor its canopy, even when left to its own organic devices.

Despite the fact that Ireland does not have any deserts, it still has undergone a process of desertification with the occurrence of blanket bog. In the mountainous regions of Ireland, the economically determined deforestation led to the leaching out of essential nutrients from the soil and consequently allowed blanket bog to emerge in place of the original woodland22 as Engels suggests in the following:

Although all the bogs of Ireland have the same concrete phenomenal forms with regard to their vegetative form and contents, the blanket bogs of the mountaintops are different from the midland bogs in that they were formed under differing ‘interconnecting’ conditions. While the low-lying bogs of the midlands are exclusively organically determined in that society played no part in their formation, but this is not so with regard to the mountain blanket bog, where their emergence is due to the metabolising and thus interconnecting processes of nature and society. Historically, society cut down the mountain forest and subsequently the blanket bog ‘formed under the influence of rain and mist’ (Engels 1986,183).

Besides these low-lying peat bogs, there are 1,254,000 acres of mountain moor. These are the result of deforestation in a damp climate and are one of the peculiar beauties of the British Isles. Wherever flat or almost flat summits were deforested – this occurred extensively in the 17th century, and the first half of the 18th century to provide the iron works with charcoal – a layer of peat formed under the influence of rain and mist and gradually spread down the slopes where the conditions were favourable (Engels 1986, 183).

20. Nature has been and continues to be changed by society and consequently creating new ‘organic’ conditions of existence for all life on earth21. Societies transform the organic vegetative land cover in their attempt to cultivate crops, especially through deforestation.

22. The deforestation can in certain bioregions cause desertification to occur.23. In removing the forest tree canopy and depending on the particular organic interconnections of the organic totality in existence, desertification can cause climate change.

22Rain that falls on a protective tree canopy and their necessary dialectical relationships (interconnections) are able to maintain the integrity of the soil beneath, which in turn sustains the forest growth and its canopy. In removing the forest trees and their essential land-cover function, society drastically realigns the metabolising matrix of the organic interconnecting processes within the Irish weather system.

‘This changes everything’ as everything is reciprocally interconnected within the dialectical processes of concrete reality

The actual physical presence of any process, such as the local weather system, manifests itself in how it impacts on, or effects other physical structures but also how those impacted structures subsequently impact back on the determining process. All causes and effects provide essential moments for that process. In short, it is a complex interplay between causes and effects within metabolising processes. For example, as we discovered with regard to the topographical features of the Irish weather system, although they appear to be external to the actual weather system, they are in fact essential and determinate moments of that organic system. Consequently, the essential determining force of this particular organic totality is the metabolising combination between the internal dynamic forces and its external conditions of existence, which these forces engage with. Change any of these moments of this organic totality, either its internal or external moments, and because of their inherent interconnecting relationships, they will change the essential structure for the whole organic totality. This is so because concrete reality and ‘Nature works dialectically’23.

Intentionality, that instrumental rationality which is one of those determining characteristics that has defined us as human beings, has historically tended to be linear in its formulation – one course of action pursued for one intended reaction – as a form of an attempted engagement with concrete reality. In fact, it is a form of reductionism, in two senses of the term. Firstly, as a conceived abstract formulation of concrete reality and secondly as a particular physical intervention into concrete reality. In the latter case, it is a one-sided attempt to impact on one aspect of that reality, yet it will always have an effect or even effects beyond the intended point of intervention, because that ‘interfered with’ reality is in fact not a reified solid object but a dialectically determined process(s), as Engels suggests:

We find that there still exists a colossal disproportion between the proposed aims and the results arrived at, that unforeseen effects predominate, and that the uncontrolled forces are far more powerful than those set in motion according to plan (Engels 1986, 35) (emphasis added).

This is especially so with regard to the so-called economic ‘planning’, where physical engagement with concrete reality, is done for the sake of immediate profit with no necessary recognition of a following on series of ecological consequences. Therefore, the actual consequence of an intended action, although rarely recognised, are in fact multiple consequences beyond the immediate intended consequence24. Accordingly, they are not only remote but also logically unintended from within the perspective of linear causality. Linear

23If the real determination of causality is the concrete concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse (Marx 1973, 100) – an effect is diametrically the opposite – it is the concrete dispersal of many determinations that effects a wide range of processes in diverse ways (remote consequences).

24As Engels suggests:

In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned with the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of their actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transformed into very reverse opposite, as shown by the course of each ten years’ industrial cycle… (182/3).

causality is not just a one to one cause and effect determination, as much as certain theorists would like it to be, but it is actually, a complex interconnected transformation of a whole range of interpenetrating processes, which fundamentally reverberates throughout the entire organic totality. Accordingly, when processes metabolise, what is an effect in one instance becomes a cause in another and so on. This is essentially a form of ‘reciprocal action’, in which, according to Engels:

We see a series of forms of motion,…..pass into one another, mutually determine one another, are in one place cause and in another effect, the sum total of all motion in all its changing forms remaining the same… Thus natural science confirms what Hegel has said,…, that reciprocal action is the true causa finalis of things (Engels 1986, 231) (emphasis added).

The one point of induced change can simultaneously function as a cause and effect for differing metabolising processes. Therefore, a consciously orchestrated intervention will not only have an immediate effect (intended or unintended) but also crucially it will have remote consequences – ‘unforeseen effects’. This has to do with how the dialectically metabolising processes become thwarted in their operation as they attempt to accommodate themselves to the impact of the initial intervention. The added complexity of having to deal with remote consequences as well as immediate consequences undermines our ability to completely hold sway over nature as Engels suggests:

‘Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it is quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first (Engels 1986, 180).

Here, Engels introduces another dimension to his dialectical exposition in which the new introduced concept of place(s) and its sequential ordering allows him and us to compare consequences over a long-time frame. In addition, it allows us to assess their impact on each other, e.g. where Engels suggests that remote consequences can ‘cancel the first’ placeimmediate effect. As we have uncovered, the immediate consequence on the inherent organic processes tend to manifest itself on the level of surface appearance within its phenomenal form, without recognising it also as being a moment of the underlying essential processes. This is where the ‘first place’ effect or immediate consequence occurs. The ‘second and third places’ are remote consequences which have to be the result of the essential organic processbeing thwarted by the initial form of the intervention. The impeded process continues to operate in its changed condition and only manifests this thwarted condition when it metabolises with other organic processes. Herein, lies the time delay between the immediate ‘first place’ result and the subsequent ‘second and third places’. The recognition of this complex relationship between the differing places where consequences emerge and even contradict each other, challenges our attempt to ‘rule over nature’ despotically:

Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly (Engels 1986, 180).

Our control of, and possible mastery over nature can be achieved by us, by moving away from perceiving and engaging with nature as a concrete static entity – ‘a rigid system of an immutably fixed organic nature’ (Engels 1986, 29) – out there beyond ourselves but by us investigating the laws of nature dialectically so that we can appropriate those organic forces without undermining or destroying them. This essentially means becoming aware not only of the immediate but even more so of the remote consequences of our actions and to do this we have to crucially realise that we are interacting with a complex matrix of metabolising processes rather than a solid unchanging concrete reality. Ignoring the remote ecological consequences, coupled with not being aware of their interconnected relationship, is having a devastating effect on our global environment, e.g. from desertification to global climate change, etc. The problem remains how can, we learn these dialectical laws of nature correctly. The answer lies, in following the conceptual steps as laid down by Marx and especially Engels on the dialectics of nature, by not only adopting a dialectical approach but also attempting to explicate those results that empirical investigation consistently fails to comprehend – the indirect effects and remote consequences:

But in this sphere, too, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing historical material, we gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote effects of our production activity, and so are afforded an opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well (Engels 1986, 180).

And in doing so, finally we can become aware of the thwarting caused by the immediate intended consequence of profitability, that capitalistic iron cage of calculability which consistently blinkers our awareness and realisation of remote ecological consequences of our intended economic actions. Engels suggests that this mystifying tendency is particularly evident in:

Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in the main examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange that are actually intended. This fully corresponds to the social organization of which it is the theoretical expression. As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account (Engels 1986, 182) (emphasis added).

The one-sidedness of such disciplines that are only able to comprehend the ‘most immediate results’ are part of the problem why we, as inhabitants of the earth, are now obviously destroying the organic processes of Nature that sustain life on earth. Curbing the disparity between immediate and remote consequences therefore is not just an epistemological problem concerning causation but a very real concrete dilemma that global society needs to be attentive of in order to re-orientate our necessary relationship with the earth and its organic processes. In order to change our orientation, we must firstly recognise that ‘Nature works dialectically’, and then we need to begin to work with that same Nature, dialectically25!

Conclusion

25 Marx stated the same need to work with nature rather than against it:

…. labour can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces (Marx, 1969, 571).

This article has attempted to explicate Marx and Engels’s conceptualisations on climate and to a lesser extent on climate change, the significance of their conceptual formulations of global climate change is not what they said about climate but how they said what they said. In short, it is their methodology rather than their insightful pronouncements which is critical to our attempt to grasp the complexity of climate and climate change. Near the end of his life, Engels highlighted this point in a letter to Sombart (1895):

Marx’s approach was not through a doctrine but a method. It doesn’t offer completed dogmas but fertile perspectives for further investigation and the method for this investigation (Engels 2004, 461).

The methodology referred to is dialectical analysis and the really significant and hopeful as- pect of Engel’s appraisal of this methodology is that it can offer ‘fertile perspectives for fur- ther investigation and the method for this investigation’. Therefore, in fact what their particu- lar form of dialectical analysis presents us with, is a radical epistemological framework that is profoundly more comprehensive in explaining the ‘workings’ of concrete reality than the non-dialectical and empirical approaches that have dominated scientific endeavours. With re- gard to the particular concrete problematic of this paper – climate and climate change – the dialectical framework suggests that we need to become aware of how the determinants of the organic totality of nature unfold its inherent organic processes. Specifically, with regard to understand how climate interconnects with the organic processes of nature and with the social processes of cultivation. The vast terrain of the concrete reality of the earth is essentially a complex matrix of metabolising processes that are not only interconnected, but are dialecti- cally interconnected (involved in reciprocal movement). Consequently, the fundamental and truly paradigm breaking aspect of this perspective is summarised by Engels in which he tated that ‘nature works dialectically’. In certain times in the evolution of science, science came close to recognising the dialectically determination of nature, as Engels suggests:

The new outlook on nature was complete in its main features; all rigidity was dis- solved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature was shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical course (Engels 1986, 30) (emphasis added).

However, it should be pointed out that this recognition is implicit rather than explicit – that is unconsciously dialectic.

Why the dialectic did not emerge within natural science needs to be investigated and some have begun this task (Sheehan 1993, Royal 2014, Engel de Mauro 2017). This ‘new outlook’, the one that is going to usher in the new epoch of ‘conscious organisation of social produc- tion’ including our relationship to organic nature is the dialectical one. The one that Marx and Engels consciously rescued ‘from German idealist philosophy and appl[ied] it in the material- ist conception of nature and history’ (Engels, Preface to second edition his Anti-Duhring MECW, vol.25, 11).

By eliminating the empirical particularities of the Irish organic and social formation from the following summary of our findings of Marx and Engels on climate, it is possible to highlight the essential dialectical workings of this ‘organic’ organic totality, in which climate is the predominate determinant, even when those organic forces are appropriated by society in the process of cultivation:

1. Climatic zones initially determine society’s wants for necessities, e.g. food, clothing and shelter. Less bountiful climatic conditions spurs societies on to produce what climate does not provide organically.▼

2. The diverse moments of the weather system consist of not only of the atmospheric forces that circle the earth but also the earth’s geological structures and crucially the vegetative land cover that naturally overlays those physical structures. Because these non- atmospheric moments impact on the weather system they become part of it.

▼3. Natural flora is a consequence of the organic interconnection between the indigenous weather system and the other organic processes of nature that mediate each other within the concrete form of the soil. While cultivated flora of crop production is a result of clearing the primeval vegetative land cover and subsequently harnessing the same organic interconnecting forces of plant fertility, topographical aspects and the weather system.▼4. Climate therefore, is the indispensable ‘life–awakening’ force of soil fertility, both organic and socially determined, to such an extent that as we cultivate the soil we simultaneously appropriate the organic forces of the immediate climatic conditions and that weather system becomes a natural agent of social production.▼

5. Nature has been and continues to be changed by society cultivating the soil as it transforms the earth’s organic vegetative cover, especially through the process of deforestation, and consequently creating new ‘organic’ conditions of existence for all life on earth, including its cultivators.▼6. Deforestation can in certain bioregions cause desertification to occur which in turn can cause climate change to follow at a micro level and thereby creating a distinct

microclimate.

In conceptually unfolding these organic processes sequentially as they enfold with each other, from atmospheric forces of the climate system, to topographical structures and then onto the vegetative land cover, we begin to understand how they merge as an ‘organic’ organic totality. Accordingly, these diverse processes appear to form a circle of metabolising organic processes, whose elements are mutually conditioning, ‘in which the condition becomes conditioned, the cause becomes the effect, the universal becomes the particular, is a characteristic feature of internal interaction through which actual development assumes the form of a circle’ (Ilyenkov 1982, 115)26. This pulsating organic core is in fact an ensemble of

26 Therefore, the kernel of this natural organic totality is not an essential static structure like a ‘solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing’ (Marx, 1867, preface to the German edition).

interconnecting processes that determine the concrete reality of nature and as Marx suggests that ‘the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence it is the unity of the diverse (Marx 1973, 100). However, this particular ‘unity of the diverse’ organic processes and their circle of mutual conditioning get transformed into a spiral form when this circle of mediating processes become appropriated by society in the social process of cultivation that now creates new socio-organic conditions of existence for society and nature to survive on. Marx has conceptualised this type of expanding movement as a change in form from a circular to a spiral form.’27It is at this spiral point of reproduction that Engels exclaimed that ‘there is devilishly little left of “nature” (Engels 1986, 231). However, since Engels stated this, the socio-organic relationships have developed more spiral forms – more intense forms of interconnections between society and nature that we need to investigate further. Within such continuing forms of transformations of the socio-organic processes of the organic totality of nature, the organic processes of climate and their dialectical interplay of relationships with the other inherent processes, including both the organic and social forms, have been fundamentally changed, beyond this initial process of deforestation. It is this process of deforestation which Marx and Engels highlighted is where society begins to effect climate and causes climate change to occur on a global scale.

In unfolding the dialectical moments that climate performs in the organic totality of cultivation, from pre-history to the present, we can begin to see the complexity of the interconnecting relationships that metabolising processes form within this ‘organic’ of organic totalities. The essential determinant of climate within this organic totality of nature, and including its integration into societal cultivation practices, is its ‘life-awakening’ powers that drive the diverse aspects of the fertility of the soil to produce vegetation. However, when the earth’s soil is cultivated, the natural history of the appropriated organic processes, including the climate, becomes metabolised with the cultural history of the cultivating society. Both historical developments become not only intrinsically interconnected but both are fundamentally transformed.

With the ever presence of interconnecting processes, that ‘work dialectically’, cause and effect cannot exist as isolated occurrences within a ‘rigid system of an immutably fixed organic nature’ (Engels 1986, 29), because such a system only exists as an ideological construct within the mind-set of the investigators and not in the real dialectical workings ofconcrete reality. Therefore, the cause and effect’ determination of reality is a spurious construct that deflects attention away from the real determinants of a dialectical reality. It is also a direct consequence of interpreting concrete reality as an ensemble of independently existing and isolated entities. Engels in the following establishes how this misconception of cause and effect as the essential determinant of reality is not only fictitious but also linked to the other fallacy that concrete reality is made up of diverse isolated phenomena:

In other words, in order to save having to give the real cause of a change brought about by a function of our organism, we substitute a fictitious cause, a so-called force corresponding to the change. Then we carry this convenient method over to the external world also, and so invent as many forces as there are diverse phenomena (Engels 1986, 80) (emphasis added).

In conclusion, Marx and Engels has proposed the cause and effect determination is inadequately one-sided in conceptualising change in a dialectically determined organic reality, and therefore it has to be superseded by a many-sided form of determinations as

27 ‘…. the gradual propagation of capital by reproduction passing it from a circular into a spiral form…Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. p.780.

produced by the complex interplay of interconnecting processes. Accordingly, multiple causes beget multiple consequences that determine dialectical reality. Consequently, the crucial manifestation of the dialectical epoch within science (including the social sciences) will occur when scientists begin to adopt the dialectical epistemology of the many-sided forms of causation instead of the one-sided linear form of cause and effect. According to Engels, this non-dialectical determination of causation has created ‘the endless confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as learners, of authors and readers alike’ (Engels, Anti-Duhring, MECW, vol.25, 24). Whatever happens in the future ‘everything changes’ whether we leave those organic forces of nature to their owndialectical devices and continue to destroy them in our contemporary non-dialectical forms of intervention or we attempt to ‘consciously control’ those dialectical forces in a planned and dialectically informed way. Everything changes because as Engels has brilliantly informed us – ‘nature works dialectically’.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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