3.5.2024.  (Working version, being edited)

---

The ‘bewitched’ world of everyday things: Engels and Marx on dialectically determined reality and the dire consequences for Nature of our failure to recognize it[1].

Everything that has a fixed form, such as a product, etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct production process itself here appears only as a moment. The conditions and objectifications of the process are themselves equally moments of it, (Marx, Grundrisse, 712).

Abstract: We want to propose that the essential root of our global environmental crises is our continual propensity to misinterpret the essential workings of the organic ecosystems of Nature. According to Marx and Engels, the ontology of concrete reality (including Nature) is determined by dialectical laws. On the surface, this ‘reality’ appears to be made up of thing-like objects with their ‘heterogeneous and independent forms’.  However, concrete reality is in fact determined by an endless maze of underlying relations and interconnections, in which nothing remains static, everything is in a state of flux’. (Engels, 1986, 29).  Therefore, the ‘surface’ reality, is a mystification, where the process of thingification holds sway and this apparent condition of existence gives rise to a misinterpretation of the workings of both social and material realities. Critically, our inherent inability to grasp this ‘bewitched’ reality by its surface appearance, comes to fore in the seemingly mysterious emergence of remote consequences. Significantly, it is when these remote consequences, determined by our economic activities appear in the ecosystems of the earth, they tend in general to be detrimental to the organic processes of the earth. In order to reverse this non-sustainable relationship to Nature, we need firstly a paradigm shift in how we interpret the organic world, by adopting a dialectical ontology where reality is determined by interconnecting processes rather than thing-like objects. Accordingly, it is necessary to flip the current capitalist relationship on its head where the commodity form dominates the organic forms of the earth’s ecosystems into a scenario where the social form and content of the use-value product is determined by their sustainability to the diverse ecosystems of the earth. Planning in this dialectical context, has to involve coordinating a vast and diverse range of interconnections of an organic totality, in order to sustain the organic ecosystems of the planet. This requires a complete overhaul of the institutions and practices of civil society (including the economy), by substituting the criterion of profitability for eco-sustainability as the essential form of assessment for all of the conditions of existence in modern society. In short, replacing the commodity form for an organic form of sustainability within a dialectically determined reality. To achieve this life saving task the global eco-movements have to adopt strategies that are informed by the dialectical understanding of natural reality in order to be effective in saving our planet. 

Introduction:

One of the assuring aspects of living on our planet is how we surround ourselves with an incredible diversity of objects that we have made. In doing so we demonstrate in these everyday things our creative ability to transform our immediate environment. Accordingly, human made things celebrate our apparent dominance over Nature and the other inhabitants that we share this earth with. So, things are an essential part of being human, but such objects are deceptive ‘things’ in that their very appearance, especially the inanimate ones, exude a sense of permanence, a near eternal quality to their existence. Yet they all come from substances extracted from the earth and will all end up back there as waste. Therefore, including the immediacy of society using them, they are in a lifecycle process, where they become things or commodities by being formed from the substances extracted from the bowels of the earth. When they lose their usefulness, they are abandoned to become rubbish, inevitability finding themselves back in the same earth that they originated from. Accordingly, these objects of everyday life although they appear as rigid and permanent thing-like entities, are in fact passing moments of this dynamic process. It is this contradiction which we are going to explore in this paper. We will investigate not only the relationship between fluid process and thingified objects but also that these things of everyday life and their underlying processes of determination are actually ecological entities determined by organic processes.

            Marx and Engels have already travelled this investigative path, and we attempt to follow in their footsteps, although it is a difficult trail to follow. However, this journey has been somewhat shortened by the recent work of John Bellamy Foster (2020, 2022) where his exhaustive and intensive research[2] has revealed the extent that Marx and Engels incorporated the ecological aspects of reality into their analysis of capitalism. This ecological incorporation is not just mere adjunct to the economic system but in actual fact it is an intrinsic and essential aspect in the reproduction of modern capitalist society. Our fore coming exposition of the dialectic within the work of Marx and Engels supports this critical finding.  

            Marx and Engels were revolutionaries to the very core of their being – challenging the status quo on all its fronts – intellectually, politically, and practically. With regard to their intellectual endeavours, their most famous recognized revolutionary work undermined the accepted dicta of political economy and in doing so they raised the necessity of a proletarian revolution. However, within their vast array of subversive activities, we also have to include their attempt to lay bare a truly radical and fundamental reassessment of how we understand reality. This incredible project of theirs, although rarely highlighted, to change the ontology and epistemology of how we interpret reality and subsequently engage with the world has the potential to put all of their other revolutionary efforts into the shade. This is especially so with regard to the contemporary environmental crisis in which the world finds itself.

In what follows, we want to propose that this paradigm-changing work of theirs in understanding the essential workings of our concrete reality, and particularly the natural realm of this reality is now increasingly becoming the necessary conceptual means which will enable us to reengage with our planet by living sustainably on it. Most of the contemporary theoretical work done on the dialectics of Marx and Engels has tended to concentrate on their use of the epistemology of dialectical analysis rather than the ontology of a dialectical determined world.  In this piece, we will be focusing in on the latter and in doing so we hope to emphasize the significance of their work on the ontology of dialectically determined reality and how that insight is critical in sustaining life on earth.

The initial and crucial step that we need to take on our journey of discovery is one that is concerned with how we interpret concrete reality, or more precisely how we have failed a to grasp adequately the determinants of that reality. Specifically, this involves our failure to account for the remote consequences of our intended actions. This is especially so with regard to those actions that occur within the sphere of the economy and how subsequently those intended economic actions impact on the ecological workings of the earth. The failure to predict remote consequences comes about because we constantly fail to recognize that we are dealing with a reality which is determined by dialectical laws, where everything is interconnected and constantly moving. It is these two essential aspects of a concrete dialectically determined reality – its fluidity and its organic connectedness that causes remote consequences to occur beyond the immediate consequence of an intended social action. That initial action, which may be but not necessary be socially determined, sets off, not only an immediate reaction (consequence), but also a series of other reactions which permeates throughout the entire interconnected (organic) totality, giving rise to a possible range of remote consequences.

However, in contrast to the dialectically determined reality as proposed by Marx and Engels, the bourgeois conceived world is one that is presumed to be made up of fixed and detached entities, – independently existing from all that merely surround them – and even Nature itself is seen to be ruled by “a rigid system of an immutably fixed organic nature” (Engels 1986, 29). The supposed essential structure of ‘thingification’ within concrete reality and its subsequent reification in the real-in-thought (Althusser) process, produces faulty one-sided accounts[3] of reality that fail to grasp the essential and fundamental determinants of the actual real world.

Therefore, thingification is a level of determination of reality which was identified in the works of Marx and Engels, but it rarely reveals itself fully and when it does it is generally appears as insightful vignettes interspersed among their economic conceptualizations. Although this understanding of reality is rarely explicitly exposed, it has enormous implications on how we comprehend and subsequently engage with concrete reality and especially the ecological base of all life on this planet.  It is our task to explicate these diverse insights and commentaries of Marx and Engels on this thingification process and present them and their implications for modernity, in a coherent exposition.

The underlying processes of dialectical reality.

                 Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law stated that Marx with regard to understanding reality ‘did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings; he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion’ (Ollman, 1976: 280). This ontological view of the concrete world is reiterated 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, 233). The same ontological perspective can also be attributed to Engels and his understanding of the natural world. Natural matter is, according to Engels is not a ‘dead’ thing-like object but a pulsating moving dynamic entity.^[4] And this essential movement does not just occur within particular objects of matter but also between all of those objects, both organic and inorganic, that are within Nature:

‘When we reflect on Nature….the first picture presented to us is an endless maze of relations and interactions, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, and comes into being and passes out of existence, …. everything is in flux’. (Engels, 1986, .26-29).

This maze of interconnections and their movement is not obvious on the surface plane of concrete reality where its contents appear to be made up of a vast array of separate and independent entities, where they ‘lie side by side in mutual indifference’ (Marx, 1993, 310) and whose apparent relationship with each 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 motion. Dialectically, all concrete entities are in reality moments within underlying processes, even non-organic phenomenon, which appear to be static on observation but are in reality fluid processes, as Engels proposes:

Continual change …. is also found in so-called inorganic nature. Geology is its history. On the surface, mechanical changes (denudation, frost), chemical changes (weathering); internally (water, acids, binding substances); on a large scale – upheavals, earthquakes, etc. The slate of today is fundamentally different from the ooze from which it is formed, the chalk from the loose microscopic shells that compose it, even more so limestone, which indeed according to some is of purely organic origin, and sandstone from the loose sea sand, which again is derived from disintegrated granite, etc., not to speak of coal (Engels. 1986, 215).

So, we have here in this example a vast range of changes, occurring over millions of years. It appears that change in non-organic phenomena does happen as it does in the organic world of plants and animals. Ilyenkov confirms this interpretation of Engel’s ontological perspective where every individual entity, both organic and non-organic are essentially moments within processes:

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).

Therefore, the implication of this dialectical understanding of the concrete world is that reality is an ensemble of diverse and interdependent, emergent processes and that in order to interpret this reality we need to uncover these determining processes. As Engels stated ‘the whole of nature lies spread out before us as a system of inter-connections and processes (Engels, 1986: 198)^[5] and even the most unlikely of things are connected such as ‘e.g., a meteorite and a man’:

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).

Thus, to ‘know’ concrete reality, we have to realize that it is not a static and unchanging solid entity, nor is Nature within such reality— “a rigid system of an immutably fixed organic nature” (Engels 1986, 29). Consequently, the essence of reality is that it is a dialectical reality, which consists of interconnections between concrete phenomena and reciprocal action between them are “the true causa finalis of things” (Engels 1986, 231; italics in the original).

Another critical implication of concrete reality being determined by dialectical laws is that in this reality, although chance may appear to occur on the surface, no event is accidental, being in fact determined by ‘inner laws’. These laws reveal the essential interconnectedness of dialectical reality, and under these determining circumstances independent and detached chance occurrences cannot exist, as Engels suggests:        

Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance. But wherever on the surface chance holds sway, it is always governed by inner laws and these laws only have to be discovered. (Engels, 1886. Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical Philosophy, 387).

Therefore, historical occurrences and events appear to randomly manifest themselves as ‘immediate form of appearances’ as thing-like phenomena or as discrete events on the surface of society, but critically beyond their surface appearance they are determined by abstract (hidden) and inner laws, which they are in fact moments^[6] of complex metabolising processes^[7] as Engels suggests in the following:

The great basic thought that the world is not comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the apparently stable things, no less than their mental images in their heads, the concepts, go through uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, for all apparent accidentality and despite all temporary retrogression a progressive development asserts itself in the end (Engels, 1886, Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical Philosophy, 384) (emphasis added). 

This apparent surface ‘reality’ of ready-made and stable things, which are not only contrasted but also determined by the presence of underlying processes. These processes are to be seen as neither being underneath nor as a base in contrast to a superstructure of the surface, but as a matrix of interconnecting relationships that encompass both the hidden interconnections of dialectical processes and the surface things as essential determining moments of an organic totality. Best conceptualized as underlying processes of an organic totality.

   A further complication has to be added to this ever-increasing dialectical 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 which society acts upon nature. However, before we discuss the dialectics of this interaction between nature and society, it is important to highlight that Nature on its own without human interference, according to Engels, is neither consciously determined nor do accidental events occur:

 In nature – in so far as we ignore man’s reverse action upon nature – there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation. Of all that happens – whether in the innumerable apparent accidents observable upon the surface, or in the ultimate results which confirm the regularity inherent in these accidents – nothing happens as a consciously desired aim. (Engels, 1886, Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical Philosophy, 387). (emphasis added).

Therefore, these ‘accidents observable upon the surface’ are either the result of the interplay of the organic laws of Nature or remote consequences which are the result of human activity but are not recognized as such. And even more critically, Engels locates the presence of a dual form[8] of reality, in which its surface appearances and its underlying innate laws of determination needs not only to be recognized but only analysing one side of this interconnected concrete reality (organic totality) will only provide a one-sided and faulty interpretation of that reality.

The conclusion of our investigation into Engels and Marx’s ontological understanding of reality is that we have to learn to reassess that the ‘real concrete’ as a dialectical real concrete. Accordingly, Althusser’s uncovering of the real-concrete – concrete reality within Marx’s analysis – has to be expanded upon to include its dialectical forces of determination, so that concrete reality becomes a dialectically determined concrete reality. Therefore, not only is the world turned upside down as the idealism of Hegel is flipped on its head and is replaced by practical materialism but also that overturned world has now to be understood as a material world that works dialectically!  One critical consequence of a dialectically determined reality is that any theory of it has to be evaluated on its ability or inability to conceptual grasp the complexity of a dialectical organic totality. Those, that are unable or unwilling, to recognize the dialectical workings of concrete reality will by implication be hindered in their capability to adequately conceptualize that reality. 

The key point to grasp is that reality and especially Nature is determined by conditions in conformity with ‘objective’ dialectics as Engels proposes:

Dialectics, the so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature… (which is characterized by) the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature. (Engels, 1983, 211) (Brackets added).

However, the dialectical workings of reality manifests themselves not in dynamic interconnecting processes but as thing-like phenomena.

‘Pure semblance’ (Marx) of surface things.

          In a brief observation Marx comments on how capital has a dual existence of being a thing and a process: ‘Money…as capital has lost its rigidity and from a tangible thing has become a process’ (263, 1) and consequently ‘Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments is always capital (258)’.This contradictory relationship between an entity being simultaneously a thing and a moment in a process

This complex form of duality that the process of thingification[9] embeds in concrete reality creates a whole series of intricate problems that gives us the opportunity to explore these issues, but critically the material/physical basis of modern society. To do this we especially want to explore that part of the material conditions of production whose elements are used in production which are sourced from Nature and consequently provide the substances of the use-value products^[10]. But a question immediately arises how those socially appropriated substances from the earth apparently lose their explicit ecological aspects (origins) in thing-form of the use-value product. Accordingly, it is our task to investigate how this thingification process impacts on these ecological attributes within the use-value product and subsequently how these commodity thing-like entities form the essential ecological base of capitalist society.

According to Tairako, these blinding and mystifying tendencies of the thingification process come to the fore in Marx’s discussion of the ‘economic trinity’ (Tairako, 2018, 5) and how they become concrete social forms of surplus value – land-rent, labour-wage and capital-profit – by emerging from the abstract process of valorization and manifesting themselves as separate and independent forms on the surface of society, as Marx suggests in the following:

It is clear that, as soon as surplus-value [is split up] into different, separate  parts , related to various production elements, such as nature, products, labour, – which only differ physically, that is, as soon as in general surplus-value acquires special form, separate from one another, independent of one another and regulated by different laws, the common unit – surplus-value – and consequently the nature of this common unit, becomes more and more unrecognisable and does not manifest itself in the appearances but has to be discovered as a hidden mystery. The assumption of independent forms by the various parts – and their confrontation as independent forms – is completed as a result of each of these parts being related to a particular element as its measure and special source; in other words, each part of surplus-value is conceived as the effect of a special cause, as an adjunct of a particular substance. Thus, profit is related to capital, rent to land, wages to labour. (Marx, TSV, part 3, 484) (emphasis highlights aspects of the process of thingification).

Therefore, a crucial part of our task is to investigate not only the ‘hidden mystery’ of the thing form of the natural materials that are embedded in use-value product but also how those materials are in fact ecological materials appropriated by society. In pursuing this line of inquiry, we hope this endeavour will provide us with the key to explicating the ecological determinants of modern capitalist society.

Marx continues by tracing out the implications of these apparent ‘independent forms’ of revenue sources derived from the three factors of production and especially with regard to how they hide on the surface their inner connections which actually exist between these apparent things. This act of concealment is especially exploited by those theoreticians who support the status quo of Capitalism as they emphasize this seemingly heterogeneous nature of reality with its independent and isolated thing-like forms, as Marx suggests:

This, moreover, renders a substantial service to apologetics. For [in the formula] land-rent, capital-interest, labour-wages, for example, the different forms of surplus-value and configurations of capitalist production do not confront one another as alienated forms, but as heterogeneous and independent forms, merely different from one another but not antagonistic. The different revenues are derived from quite different sources, one from land, the second from capital and the third from labour. Thus, they do not stand in any hostile connection to one another because they have no inner connection whatsoever. (Marx, TSV part 3, 503) (emphasis added).

However, accepting the validity of these assertions, we want to propose that this obscuring of the real interconnections between surface things does not just include the social aspect of production but also it has a vital ecological dimension to it, where the physical use-value forms of these identified parts of surplus value have material elements that are physical substances extracted from Nature. Consequently, both the social and organic forms of these surface things remain a ‘hidden mystery’ because these aspects of their origins and their forms of existing being are unrecognizable in their thing-like forms on the surfaces of the bourgeois world – either social or organic. These apparent thing-like entities of surface reality and how their appearance hides their essential social and natural forms, it is this process of thingification.

It is not the actual physical appearance of reality that is problematic it is how we understand and interpret how those surface appearances come about and how they continue to reproduce themselves. So, this problematic we are exploring revolves around how reality is determined, how we interpret it, and how we subsequently engage with that reality. On the surface of this concrete reality appears to be a thingified reality, where its apparent physicality is one determined by the presence of thing-like entities, ‘separate from one another, independent of one another and regulated by (their own) different laws’ (Marx, TSV, part 3, 485) (brackets added).This world of isolated and fixed things which give the impression of being natural condition of existence for the activities of ordinary everyday life, are not immediately recognizable as the result of man’s social activity (Kosik, 1976, 2). Marx extends this point by suggesting that ‘they exist in forms which, not only conceal, but which disavow their real origin (Marx, TSV, part 3, 512). Accordingly, the thingified objects of surface reality deny their social origins by how their overwhelming presence in everyday life impacts on the consciousness of ordinary people[11] as Kosik proposes:

The collection of phenomena that crowd the everyday environment and the routine atmosphere of human life, and which penetrate the consciousness of acting individuals with a regularity, immediacy, and self-evidence that lend them a semblance of autonomy and naturalness constitutes the world of …[things] (Kosik, 1976, 2) (brackets included).

Consequently, this crowded collection of thingified objects condition the ‘consciousness of acting individuals’ to accept these objects as a natural part of everyday life. The physical components of the thing-like use-value of a commodity are not just sourced from nature but also these natural components as physical substances form the essential material substrate of the use-value product, while the form, which is physically manifested in its thing-like form, is provided by the labour of society as Marx continues in the following:

The use-values coat, linen etc., – in brief, the commodity-bodies – are connections of two elements, natural matter and labour. If one subtracts the total sum of all different instances of useful labour which lurk inside the coat, linen etc., there are always remains a material substrate left over which is present naturally without the interference of man. Man, can only proceed in his producing like nature does herself; i.e. only change the forms of material. And what is more, in this labour formation itself he is constantly supported by natural forces (Marx on the commodity, Capital, vol.1) (emphasis added).

The unfolding phases of the thing-forms within the life cycle of a commoditized use-value product. Earth constituents (extracted) → raw material → use-value product → commodity good → consumable → waste matter → earth constituents (re-integrated).

The ‘change [in] the forms of material’ occurs within the use-value product between the point of extraction of the natural matter in the form of raw material from the earth and how it moves through its production processes and out into the world of circulation and consumption, and finally becoming waste to end up back in the physical confines of the earth. This movement of the social and physical forms of ‘natural’ material of the use-value product is presented in the following:

This presentation[12] locates the position that the concrete forms of the use-value product unfold themselves within the life cycle of the commodity product. From the reservoirs of the earth, the natural matter is extracted from and subsequently they are formed into raw material to be used in the production processes. Finally, these use-value products move through the processes of circulation and individual consumption to become waste and then to reach their final destination when those discarded substances are re-integrated back into the subterranean realm of the earth.  This movement within the life cycle of the use value product is not exclusively a social/spatial process of transportation of matter but also involves a movement through a diverse range of form metamorphoses, in which some of these are material and others are social[13]. Several of these forms are concrete forms – thing-like forms that are convenient for society to (1) appropriate the organic substances from the earth, which Marx has identified as natural matter, (2) to work them up as raw material in production processes (3) and to be physically stored and transported as their last social thing-like form in the social process of consumption and finally (4) to integrate their waste form back into the ‘bowels of the earth’.

 Significantly, this life cycle of the organic elements within the changing physical forms of the use-value product is the fundamental dynamic of the ecological reproduction of modern capitalist society. Recognizing this material life cycle of the use-value product and its necessary ecological contents within its thingified forms, is the critical first step necessary to uncover not only the reality of our ecological dependence on Nature, but also it is necessary for us to realize how we continually damage that relationship we have with the natural forces of the earth.

Therefore, these concretized forces of nature that are appropriated by society are not just in general thwarted by the thingification of its processes but with regard to capitalism the specific nature of this thwarting is determined by how use-value production is geared towards providing consumable goods and as many of those goods that can be consumed. In short, it is the valorization process that reigns over the thingification process of capitalist society. However, on the other hand this value form of the thing-commodity is itself dependent on the material substructure of the use-value product and its inherent ecological base, which in turn are determined by the organic forces of natures. On the surface of everyday life, they appear to remain in a near dormant state of inactivity[14], to be reactivated in their natural form when their use-value form is no longer needed by society and the rest of their life cycles is characterized by a state of idleness. The abandonment of the use-value product in its life cycle, provide the opportunity for the organic forces of nature to regain their control over the social and thingified forms of commodity products when the product begins to decay and perish. In general, the thing-form is the essential way any society appropriates the ‘fruits’ of nature for its own survival – it is the necessary social and physical form that we as humans mediate our relationship with Nature.

 The essential mechanism of the obliteration of the social aspects of capitalist production is achieved through the thingification process. Thingification is both a physical and simultaneously an ideological process, in that it is a physical form of a surface appearance, in which the immediate environment, appears on the level of immediate scrutiny (without scientific insight), to consist of artificial thing-like objects.

 In not exposing its underlying processes of determination the thingification process mystifies how the immediate observer can interpret this ‘obvious’ thing-like formation of concrete reality. In short, the diversity and the amount of apparent surface things within concrete reality and how they have ‘assumed an independent and rigid existence’ (Marx,  TSV, part 2, 48), eclipse the presence of their abstract determining processes and how those processes interconnect those surface things^[15]. Therefore, the ‘pure semblance’ (Marx, Grundrisse, 312) of the concrete things of surface reality, creates material conditions for the observers of reality to ideologically misinterpret that reality. Things don’t look or appear natural – as consisting of natural materials sourced from the earth. For example, it is hard to perceive or imagine the natural substance of oil in plastic utensils. The surface artificiality of a use-value product is manifested in the accompanying ‘artificial’ characteristics of the design shape, aesthetic and use ability which ‘eclipse’ the inherent and ever-present ‘earthy’ matter that provide the physical substances for the production of our glittering consumer products of contemporary society. This branding of the commodity can manifest itself on the physical use-value product in diverse ways – ‘the shaping of the body of the commodity, the particular elaboration of its ‘skin’, its representation on the package, its decoration in display…’ (Haug, 2006: ). Consequently, this particular aesthetic form of the thingification further intensifies the mystification of the physical, including the organic) and social origins of the use-value product[16].Marx summarises this tendency in the following:

The different relations and aspects not only become independent and assume a heterogeneous mode of existence, apparently independent of one another, but they seem to be the direct properties of things, they assume a material shape. (Marx, TSV, part 3, 514).

The ‘material shape’ of the thing-object reveals itself by its external outer shell or skin-like countenance this physically shaped frame encloses its particular contents^[17]. Both the inner contents and the external shaped form are made up of material substances that, although altered in the ‘fermentation’ of the labour processes, are sourced from Nature, from the earth’s resources. It is only when the thing-product has ended its life cycle as a use-value form, after it has been completely consumed and subsequently discarded by society as a waste object that it explicitly exposes on its surface its ecological constituents. The disintegration of the thing-form and the emergence of its up-till-now hidden organic inners occurs when finally, the thing-object falls prey to the forces of decay. Nicolaus in the following grasps the significance of not only when a thing decays but also highlighting the constant movement involved in the life cycle of surface things:

In short, for Marx, as for Hegel, the problem of grasping a thing is firstly the problem of grasping it is in motion. This logic is rendered more difficult by the fact that in the ordinary course of events it is by no means obvious that this is so. Only when things suddenly crack and break apart does it become obvious that there was a dynamic within them all the time; but ordinarily, things present an appearance of rest. (Hegel, Logic 1, werke v, 123).     (Martin Nicolaus, 1993, Foreword, 1993, 30).

The more organic components within the thing-product, as in food, in contrast to inorganic components such as in inanimate products will dissolve their thing-form quicker than inorganic items, but all things will decay in time. However, the forces of decay and decomposition as they appear on and within the thing-object are the surface evidence of not only the ecological origins of the use-value product but also of how the underlying ecological processes are regaining their dominance over the temporary existing thing forms of bourgeois society. But as the thing-form retains its conditions of existence it will continue to dominate the contents of its organic substances and they being moments of underlying ecological processes.

 Consequently, the thingification process becomes itself a process of mystification of the concrete reality within the commodity world of modern capitalism. For example, in Marx’s discussion of the retail trade, the commodity product, when it is purchased, evades the exploitative relationship between the capitalist millionaires and their workers because they both appear on the surface society as simple buyers of commodities:

In so-called retail trade, in the daily traffic of bourgeois life as it proceeds directly between producers and consumers, in petty commerce, where the aim on one side is to exchange the commodity for money and on the other side is to exchange money for commodity, for the satisfaction of individual needs – in this movement, which proceeds on the surface of the bourgeois world, there and there alone does the motion of exchange values, their circulation proceed in its pure form. A worker who buys a loaf of bread and a millionaire who does the same appear in this act only as simple buyers, just as, in respect to them, the grocer appears to them only as seller. All other aspects are here extinguished. The content of these purchases, like their extent, here appears as completely irrelevant compared with the formal aspect. (Marx, 1993, 251) (emphasis added).

Included among these extinguished aspects have to be its ecological elements of the commodity thing and like its social aspects, these ecological aspects also ‘appears as completely irrelevant compared with the formal aspect’ of being a thing-like product. The ‘pure semblance’ of things on the surfaces of reality inherently mystifies that reality and this includes the reality of our dependence on the ecological conditions of the earth’s ecosystems, in order to produce such thing-like products for our survival.

The ‘unearthing’ of the thingification process on the surface of bourgeois society and its specific form of ‘concrete’ reality which has emerged under its sway, allows us to begin to perceive the presence of a level of determination that operates between the surface appearance of things and the underlying fluid processes that determine the totality of that reality. This constant tussle between thing and process is a determining feature of concrete reality as Nicolaus in his Foreword to Marx’s Grundrisse succinctly locates:

This surface of calm over unceasing restlessness. Hegel called Daesin, or presence; and when the senses are brought into the relationship, it becomes the appearance of things. Hegel wittily defined this presence as ‘having the form of the one-sided, immediate unity’ of the opposites beneath its surface (Hegel, Logic 1, werke v, 123).     (Martin Nicolaus, 1973, Foreword, 1993, 30).

The ‘immediate unity of the opposites’ between the thing and the process is especially significant within the use-value product of the commodity form. Within the social usefulness of the product, there is a constant struggle between the thing form of its surface and its underlying fluid processes[18] that mediate not only its internal content but also its external form. The one essential process mediated is the ecological process that exists within the material structures of commodities.

It is critical to highlight that within this contradictory relationship between the surface thing and its underlying determining processes is the ecological relationship that society has with Nature under capitalism, where the thing-like form of the commodity, especially with regard to inanimate objects, eclipse the presence of underlying ecological processes that determine the materiality of society’s products. This condition of existence that the thingification process has imposed on the surface appearance of everyday reality has, according to Marx, created a ‘bewitched world:

Thus the participants in capitalist production alive in a bewitched world and their own relationships appear to them as properties of things, as properties of the material elements of production. (Marx, TSV, part 3, 514).

One of the aspects of this bewitchment of reality, is bourgeois society inability to understand the emergence of remote consequences (unintended effects).

The apparent ‘mystery’ of remote consequences.

In his unfinished work, Dialectics of Nature, Engels raises the issue of how we control our destiny with regard to the evolution of society and its relationship to Nature. In comparison to the animals and their historical development, human control of natural history is determined by conscious awareness of Nature’s structure (Engels, 1986, 34). In our attempt to control our destiny, especially in times of crisis and even more so when that crisis is global, conscious planning becomes a necessity for our survival. And the success of this planning depends on our ability to predict and master the ‘unforeseen effects and forces’ of historical evolution, as Engels suggests in the following:

…, the more they make their history consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and forces on this history, and the more accurately does the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in advance (Engels, 1986, 34).  

However, even in ‘the most developed peoples of the present’, unforeseen effects still dominate our ability to control our destiny, according to Engels:

We find that there is 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 that those set-in motion according to plan.’ (Engels, 1986, 35).

The ‘unforeseen effects’ determined by ‘uncontrolled forces’ are conceptually grasped by Engels in the concept of remote consequences. Remote consequences and our understanding of them becomes a pivotal point in our attempt to control our destiny within concrete reality. There are a number of explicit examples of remote consequences within the works of Marx and Engels, but especially Engels, where they discuss their presence in historical development.

In another of his unfinished works on the History of Ireland Engels provides a good example of remote consequences. In his analysis of Ireland’s ecological conditions (Slater, 2018 and 2022), he discusses the occurrence of mountain 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 (cold wet swamp)to emerge in place of the original woodland^[19] as Engels suggests in the following:

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 17^th century, and the first half of the 18^th 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).

As Engels states the immediate consequence of cutting down the mountain forests was to obtain charcoal for iron smelting, but the remote consequence of this economically orchestrated activity was the emergence of bog on these deforested mountains. 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 – as a result of the immediate economic intention of money accumulation through forest harvesting. The following on remote consequence of this economic activity was the ecological emergence of blanket bog. While the low-lying bogs of the midlands of Ireland 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 metabolizing and thus interconnecting processes of nature and society. Specifically, with regard to this Irish society, the colonial landlords cut down the mountain forests and subsequently these deforested mountains were covered with blanket bog ‘formed under the influence of rain and mist’ (Engels 1986, 183).

Unintended effects (remote consequences) are especially prone to occur when we engage with Nature. This engagement with Nature is not out of choice but out of necessity for us to produce our ‘requirements of life’. We are therefore forced to engage in social production, which in turn ‘forms the material foundation of all our other activities, namely the production of our requirements of life’ (Engels, 1986, 35) and as Engels continues:

‘in our day social production is above all subject to the interplay of unintended effects from uncontrolled forces and achieves its desire end only by the way of exception, but the much more frequently the exact opposite. In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have definitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously did. And what is the result. (Engels, 1986, 35).

Another example of this inability to predict and foresee the remote consequences ‘of actions directed to this [the most tangible result] turn out to be of quite a different, mainly even of quite an opposite character’ is Engel’s discussion of the activities of the Cuban plantation owners:  

What did it matter to the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees, what did it matter to them that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock? (Engel, 2010c, MECW, vol.25, 463).    

The immediate consequence of the Spanish coffee planters cutting down and burning the mountain rainforest was the growth of ‘highly profitable coffee trees’, but this intended action of ‘slash and burn’ was not able to foresee the more remote and unintended consequences that we associated with the process of desertification. Since these ‘tillers of the soil’ were capitalist plantation owners they were only interested in maintaining their economic viability^[20]. But to achieve this they had to overcome the particular form of the metabolic rift associated with coffee cultivation^[21]. Consequently, they sought the cheapest form of badly needed fertilizer for their coffee plantations, which turned out to be locally sourced from the surrounding forests. But the remote consequences that emerged much later than the grabbing of the forest ashes were not located on the plantation estates but were to be seen on the mountain sides where the original rainforest flourished.

The remote consequences emerged because the seasonal tropical rains continued to fall however not on the canopy of a rainforest but on a lower layer of vegetative land cover. Thus, the initial burning of the trees and the subsequent removal of the protective canopy meant that the tropical rainfall was now metabolizing with scrawnier 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 metabolizing processes that were slowly changing and finally reaching a point (currently known as a tipping point) where a number of aspects and conditions of existence of the original metabolizing 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 thwarting of the ‘abstract’ metabolizing processes – the remote consequences. However, that same action of wrenching of concrete object from its immediate environment also eliminated that physical moment from its functional role it performed within the matrix of metabolizing organic processes. In removing this interconnection, the metabolizing operations of the organic processes became increasingly impeded in which that original canopy was functioning as an essential moment in the reproduction of that local Cuban ecosystems.

Therefore, the Cuban example revealed the emergence of one remote consequence, but in his brief discussion of the Italian Alps Engels uncovers the presence of multiple remote consequences and thereby adding another layer of complexity to this problematic:

When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons^[22] (Engels, 1986, 180).

We have to presume that the deforestation engaged in by these Italian farmers was a result of a collective and conscious decision made by them for short-run economic gain, which was the intended and sought-after immediate consequence. However, Engels suggests that this particular action had not just one following-on remote consequence but a number of remote consequences. The one-off action of cutting the trees down destroyed the dairy industry in that locality. The destruction of the dairy industry was probably determined by how the elimination of the mountain forest, impacted on the whole water supply system depriving that industry of its essential raw material for milk production – water, however, ‘during the rainy season’ another consequence emerged, whereby getting rid of forest trees and their canopy, the heavy rainfall had no barrier to prevent it forming furious torrents of water flowing off the mountains onto plains below. Therefore, one physical engagement with concrete reality can have not only remote consequences but multiple remote consequences.  

Therefore, a consciously orchestrated intervention will not only have an immediate effect (intended and unintended) but also crucially it will have the potential to have many remote consequences – ‘unforeseen effects’. This has to do with how the dialectical metabolizing processes become thwarted in their operation as they attempt to accommodate themselves to the impact of the initial intervention (and some of the following-on remote consequences) and the failure of those ‘social agents of change’ to understand and realize that they are dealing with a complex changing reality, even in its natural form. Accordingly, this added complexity of having to deal with a number of remote consequences as highlighted in the case of the deforestation of the Southern Alps, undermines our ability to control 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).

Engels is proposing here is that we may believe that our intended action ‘brings about the results we expected’, but the ‘unforeseen effects’ – the remote consequences – can in time reverse the perceived accomplishment achieved by the immediate action – following on consequence. There are two critical points in Engels commentary here that needs to be emphasized. Firstly, this analysis here of the interconnections between immediate and remote consequences with regard to our engagement with nature has profound implications for our understanding of the societal relationships we have with the complex workings of Nature. It is not a simple one-to-one relationship. Secondly, Engels introduces another dimension to his analytical exposition in which the new introduced concept of place(s) and its sequential ordering allows us to compare consequences over a long-time frame and also to assess their impact on each other – ‘cancel the first’ place immediate effect. Thus, Engels adds further level of complexity to his understanding of causation by suggesting that remote consequence can be not only many in number but also this string of consequences can be hierarchical in their impact on reality, through the idea of sequential places. The initial action and its immediate following-on consequence is where the ‘first place’ effect or consequence occurs. The ‘second and third places’ are therefore remote consequences which have to be the result of the essential organic process being 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 metabolizes 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 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).

It is critical to point out even at this stage of our analysis is that Engels is referring here to dialectical laws.

However, our analysis so far has concentrated on the work of Engels, but Marx was also aware of how remote consequences can occur as he indicates in following where he comments on the work of Fraas in a letter that he sent to Engels: 

Very interesting is the book by Fraas (1847): Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, eine Geschichte beider, namely as proving that climate and flora change in historical times…. He claims that with 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 steppe formation occurs. The first effect of cultivation is useful, but finally devastating through deforestation, etc…. The conclusion is that cultivation—when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point)—leaves deserts behind it, Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece^[23]. So once again an unconscious socialist tendency! (emphasis added).

Marx reveals here not only the emergence of the remote consequence of desertification after deforestation but also how society needs to understand and control these unintended remote consequences. However, intriguingly Marx also mentions that the bourgeoisie may be unable to plan to control remote consequences while socialists consciously can. As we are going to discover, through the work of Engels, this blindness to remote consequences is a result of a particular bourgeois perspective of reality.

            However, at certain times in the evolution of the natural sciences, some of their scientists have been forced to recognize remote consequences but because of the inherent discrete orientation of their research activities, none of these discoveries led to a paradigm change towards a dialectical understanding of reality. A consequence of this fragmentation in the trajectory of the natural sciences is their inability to recognize the essential tenet of dialectical science is the presence of reciprocal interconnections.  Engels also suggests that this inherent inability to predict remote consequences with precision is also manifested in the difference between the production activities of society and the less successful predictability in the more social/political activities of society:

It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions in the field of production, but it has been still more difficult in regard to the more social effects of these actions (Engels, 1986, 181)

Here, we believe that Engels is referring more to industrial production rather than agricultural production, where according to Marx the organic forces of Nature, and especially climate, still instils a degree of unpredictable in the cultivation of crops.^[24] Engels continues by discussing how the immediate ‘social effects’ of how the adoption of the potato diet by the lower classes in most European countries impacted on their living conditions, but the same immediate ‘social effects’ had dire remote consequences for Irish peasantry – their ‘extermination’ (Engels, 1971:190).

…. the effect which the reduction of the workers to a potato diet had on the living conditions of the masses of the people in whole countries, or compared to the famine the potato blight brought to Ireland in 1847, which consigned to the grave a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the emigration overseas of two million more? (Engels, 1986, 181).

It is important to point out that the adoption of the potato by the Irish peasantry and the Famine like all remote consequences is not determined by a singular causation but by multiple causes, which we are going to discover, are embedded in a matrix of interconnecting processes^[25].

But probably the most significant and critical use of remote consequences, and one that we will return to, is Marx’s comment on how Capitalism destroys both the soil and the worker:

Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the soil for a given time is progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. (Marx, 1976, 638) (emphasis included).

One aspect of Marx identifying remote consequence in this case of capitalist agriculture is that cause and the consequence can occur simultaneously, the only difference is the differing time periods between them with the concrete manifestation of the consequence happening later.

Both Engels and Marx’s awareness of remote consequences and especially how they interconnect the economic activities of capitalist society with its ecological base is not only a critical conceptualization of the relationship between society and nature but also, they highlight the complex interaction between intended actions and unintended effects of those actions. This is particularly relevant to how we continually damage our ecological environment without us becoming fully conscious of our actions. In this light, Engels and Marx have become our conceptual ‘canaries’ in the eco-mineshaft of the workings of the earth.

            Therefore, the existence of remote consequences poses a challenge to our ability to understand and to engage with reality, especially the ecological reality of the natural world. Their unpredictability is a constant reminder that we are not masters of our destiny and if we don’t gain the power to control the emergence of remote consequences that are detrimental to our global environment, we are more than likely to continue to destroy our earth. Accordingly, we urgently need to discover why we have failed to understand why they occur. The failure of bourgeois understanding of reality to see it as a dialectically determined reality has given rise, but this misinterpretation of concrete reality has even penetrated the scientific community producing according to Marx and Engels fictitious ‘scientific’ theories.

The false consciousness of surface scrutiny and the fictitious[26] ‘scientific’ interpretations.

In a letter that Marx wrote to Engels on 27 June 1867, Marx identified how the vulgar interpretation of reality is determined by the thingification process as it operates at the level of surface appearances:

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. (Marx, p). (emphasis added).

These ‘conceivers’ of reality are vulgar because they perceive reality as not only being made up of detached thing-like objects but this thingified reality can be understood at the ‘immediate form of appearances’. Thus, the thingification process creates a fictitious ontology of concrete reality where its’ apparent reality is a world consisting of things rather than processes, and these detached and independent things dominate the apparent forms of interaction between ourselves and those things. Operating through this mystifying ideology, the thing-like phenomena will always appear as given – ‘ready-made’ (Marx, TSV, 1978, pt 3, 485). What needs to be explored from within this ideological framework are the diverse relationships that are presumed to exist between these apparent phenomenal things and how those surface relationships can be engaged with for intended results. The critical point to be highlighted here is that the apparent ‘ready-made’[27] things of surface reality conditions the emergence of a particular form of consciousness, which Marx identified as vulgar:  

As such, they in fact determine the actions of individual capitalists, etc, and provide the motives, which are reflected in their consciousness. Vulgar political economy does nothing more than express in doctrinaire fashion this consciousness, which, in respect motives and notions, remain in thrall to the appearance of the capitalist mode of production. And the more it clings to the shallow, superficial appearance, only bringing it into some order, the more it considers that it is acting ‘naturally’ and avoiding all abstract subtleties.  (Marx, TSV, part 3, 485). (emphasis added).

Accordingly, the dual form of thingification process apparently determines not only the material reconfiguration of concrete reality but it also conditions the way we interpret reality and subsequently how we physically engage with that reality. When thingification is deemed to be the exclusive determination of and its inherent interpretative apparatus of surface reality, direct and immediate engagement with reality is generally done through the application of linear cause and effect logic by the engaging social agents. The bourgeois obsessive preoccupation with the immediate consequences of intended actions is not just determined by their insatiable desire for profitability but it is very much based on the assumption that concrete reality is fixed and unchanging in its diverse configurations. This presumed solidity and permanence is not just perceived to be the essential attribute of the physical world, including of course its natural realm, but also it is imagined to prevail within the economic world of Capitalism. This particular blinding illusion is evident in the consciousness of those ‘social agents of practical activities’ who attempt to control specific workings of a complex ‘concrete’ world by the use of the one-sided linear cause-and-effect framework, Kosik highlights this tendency:

Immediate utilitarian praxis and corresponding routine thinking…. allow people to find their way about the world, to feel familiar with things and to manipulate them, but it does not provide them with a comprehension of things and of reality. That is why Marx could write that agents of social conditions feel at ease, as fish do in water, in the world of phenomenal forms that are alienated from their inner connections and are in such isolation absolutely senseless (Kosik, 1976, 1/2).

In short, the inherent immediacy of practical engagement with and in this thingified reality ensures the use of the simple trajectory of cause-and-effect. This orientation creates a disparity between what is intended to be achieved and what is actually achievable – the former is determined by an ideological outlook while the latter is determined by the structure of concrete reality and how it is engaged with. Everything consciously done, does more than what was intended! In more specific terms, the normal bourgeois view of the reality is a world of things, while in fact concrete reality is determined by underlying processes. This mismatch between understanding reality and the actual workings of concrete reality itself is also present within the science of political economy where the faulty solution of linear cause-and-effect is given a theoretical articulation as Engels suggests:  

Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie in the main examines only the 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, 182/3) (emphasis added).

 Linear cause-and-effect is a particular strategy of engagement with a preconceived plan to rearrange certain components of reality (natural and social) based upon the false understanding that concrete reality is static and thing-like in its configuration. Accordingly, the linear cause-and-effect approach assumes that remote consequences do not exist, and that the trajectory of this approach is not only linear but also crucially that it results in just one immediate and intended consequence[28]. For this orientation to be successful, no underlying processes are presumed to exist or determine the workings of this misconceived ontology of reality. But these alleged conditions of a thing-like reality do not exist, – linear cause-and-effect trajectory of engagement with reality will always produce more than its intended consequence – remote consequences[29]. Here begins, with regard to the bourgeois understanding of reality, the mystery of remote consequences.  Besides even when they are seen to emerge, they tend to be interpreted as discrete and isolated chance events. The apparent discreteness and detachment of accidental events only occurs in the consciousness of societal agents and their inability to recognize the underlying determinants of remote consequences. This conjured up and delusional ‘reality’ has become the particular bourgeois form of ontology as reflected within the concrete-in-thought. This blindness to understand the dynamic underlying forces of concrete reality, and especially those forces that are inherent in ecological processes, is constantly hindering our ability to sustain our environment and ourselves with that environment. One key consequence of the thingification process is that our conceptual orientation in our surface scrutiny of reality is that we only see things as we attempt to make sense of the ’unorganised mass of the whole’ of the organic totality of reality

The following by Marx is how an ideological construction is involved in our understanding of reality thus creating a thing-like concepts – interpretative rigid impressions – from a dialectically determined concrete reality:

‘…… understanding is not only one-sided but has the essential function of making the world one-sided, a great and remarkable work, for only one-sidedness can extract the particular from the unorganised mass of the whole and give it shape (Marx, 1975, 1843, MECW, vol.1;233) (emphasis added).

This form of conceptualizing since it is one-sided can only provide a static identity to the thing formulation and subsequently would eliminate the possibility of locating the dialectical determination of the thing-object. This loss of movement and change that would be grasped through a two-sided interpretation. Here is a perfect example of the process of reification in which an interpretation of reality can only express particular static aspects of that reality and not its essential moving and interconnected structure. Thus, Marx highlights the inherent inadequacy of this type of one-sided interpretation, which we mundanely use when we engage with concrete reality. And although it may be faulty it is this one-sided form of interpretation that we continue to use it to make sense of ‘the unorganised mass ‘of the world. But this reified one-sided form of interpretation tends to pierce into reality by ‘extracting the particular’ features from the whole of reality observed and thereby give those identified features a ‘character of a thing’. Kosik identifies this trend with regard practical activities:

All activity is ‘one-sided’ because it purses a particular goal, and therefore, isolates some moments of reality as essential while, leaving others aside. This spontaneous activity elevates certain moments important for attaining particular goals and thus cleaves a unified reality, intervenes in reality, ‘evaluates’ reality. (Kosik, 1976, 5) (emphasis added).

This enacted rationality cleaves concrete reality by how the pursuit of ‘a particular goal’ is a direct manifestation of the application of linear cause and effect. It is realized in a practical activity of physical endeavour by how it ‘elevates’ immediate consequence(s) while simultaneously isolating, more often, by ignoring the emergence of remote consequences which naturally occur in a dialectically determined reality. In short, the essential ‘united reality’ of the interconnectedness of a processual world is severed by an apparent ‘spontaneous activity’ which it extracts ‘the particular [form] from the unorganised mass of the whole and give it shape (Marx, 1975, 1843, MECW, vol.1; 233). According to Marx, this process of ‘giving it shape’ begins in the thought process (concrete-in-thought) by reifying it as a thing-like object:

The character of a thing is a product of understanding. Each thing must isolate itself and become isolated in order to be something. (Marx, 1975, 1843, MECW, vol.1; 233) (emphasis given).

Consequently, this interpretative process of reification creates a particular image of a shaped thing from ‘the unorganised mass of the whole’ concrete reality. In doing so, it ideologically breaks this now imagined reified object away from the reality ‘of unorganised mass of the whole’ and consequently isolating it as a separate and independently existing thing-object from its original ‘unorganised’ and interconnecting mass of reality. A thing-like conceptualization is therefore an imagined projection of a practical engagement with reality and accordingly it is the initial point in the production of the social form of a use-value product – conceiving those naturally occurring substances as raw material ready to enter a production process. This imaginary exercise is a product of society’s attempt to interpret that reality by framing ‘the fluid essence of this content’ of the world into envisioned thing-like objects. This is a preliminary act in the process of thingification as determined by the interpretative tendency of human society to conceive and perceive the fluid and connected contents of concrete reality as thing-like. In Althusser’s terms, the thingification process begins in the ‘concrete-in- thought’. However, as we have pointed out the thingification process does not just operate on the ideological level but it also critically has a physical aspect to it, where its particular form of ideological reification manifests itself as a material practice. A good example of this propensity is the following discussion by Marx on how science subjugates the autonomous laws of nature in order to appropriate it in thingified objects of utility:

‘…. nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production (Marx, 1973, 410).

Marx here is teasing out the implications of Nature being transformed by science into a thingified object where ‘its autonomous laws’, which we hope now will be recognized as its dialectical laws, are ignored even when they are discovered. What Marx is unfolding is how society is only interested in what Nature produces – objects of utility for society to use. Apparently, society and its sciences are not concerned in how those organic objects are produced and reproduced by Nature, they are only interested in those surface objects as objects of utility rather than the actual forces (laws) that generated them. Even when those laws are actually investigated, it is done so in order to appropriate those natural objects more efficiently. 

The overall epistemological consequence of this process of thingification is that there are not only a ‘manifold diversity of’ things in the world but also all of these things create a vast number of one-sided interpretations, as Marx continues to suggest:

By confining each of the contents of the world in a stable definiteness and as it were solidifying the fluid essence of this content, understanding brings out the manifold diversity of the world, for the world would not be many-sided without the many one-sidednesses. (Marx, 1975, 1843, MECW, vol.1; 233)[30].

Accordingly, if this conceived reality is essentially a thingified entity, one that is made up of a ‘manifold diversity’ of things then our one-sided interpretation of these ‘real’ things will have to reflect this thing ‘diversity of the world’ by producing an equally many one-sided interpretations. One significant consequence of this process of intellectual reification is that this apparent diversity of isolated things when investigated scientifically, has to reflect this thingified diversity. This particular trajectory creates an epistemology which fragments its investigative endeavours into concrete reality by piece-meal forms of investigation. Consequently, the epistemological understanding of reality is one in which the internal interconnecting determinations that are inherent in the workings of an organic totality are rarely if ever incorporated into scientific research. And when they are included, they are generally perceived to be external and thereby subordinate to the internal determinations of the ‘detached’ phenomenon.

However, leaving science aside, in the mundane engagements with reality, the linear cause-and-effect logic as applied to the real world is concerned with the relationships between things and people and where the sought-after effect becomes an immediate consequence, which is generally determined by social agents consciously engaging in a planned activity. They attempt to activate certain ‘moments’ of concrete reality in a hoped-for exclusive linear trajectory. It is very much a short-term strategy and the temporal immediacy of this action and reaction does not intellectually allow for the emergence of remote consequences nor the recognition of the determination of underlying processes. Processes that are ever present in reality because they condition it and play determinant roles are never recognized as active agents. Rather their manifested concrete moments are only understood as static thing-like objects or events. Remote consequences under these circumstances appear as more like chance or accidental events belonging to a different time frame and often spatially beyond the initial place/point of engagement, when ‘something’ has gone wrong with the engagement with reality. In contrast to this flawed interpretation, dialectical understanding sees remote consequences are in fact connected to immediate consequences and even to the initial act of engagement because they are all determined by forces that are endemic in the processes of concrete reality, which have been impacted upon by the initial action of the social agents.

When the linear cause-and-effect logic is the epistemological basis of a planned intended action, the actual physical activity tends to be focused in on an attempt to control the perceived variables needed to achieve the intended task. The other present ‘variables’ (moments) of a functioning organic totality are often ignored, – as Marx succinctly put it as he observed– ‘One perceives that here the difficutly is always eliminated by disregarding it…’ (Marx, 1978, TSV, part 3, 539) and if not ignored they could be pronounced as trivial side-effects. However, in certain instances of the practical engagement with reality, the social agents may endeavour to be make them ineffective by attempting to break their organic/elemental interconnectedness. The complexity of any engagement with dialectical concrete reality, is not just manifested with regard to the multitude of consequences that emerge but also with regard to many determinations of causation. This situation calls into question the ability of linear cause-and-effect to adequately account for any event – intended or not. At most linear cause-and-effect is one-sided and inadequate, at worst it is misleading and fictitious.

Therefore, the conceptual consequences of reality being dialectical is that the formulation of causes and effects within the framework of linear cause-and-effect logic will always be fictitious! This has profound implications for the ‘vulgar’ empiricist’s attempt to explicate the causation of concrete phenomena as Engels suggests in the following:

In other words, in order to save having to give the real cause of a change brought about by a function of our organism (with its inherent maze of relations and interactions), 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 and brackets included).

In falsely ‘solidifying the fluid essence of the content’ of reality (Marx, 1975, MECW, vol.1: 233) the vulgar empiricist has no choice but to propose ‘a fictitious cause’ for an empirical phenomenon under investigation which has already been isolated as an independent ‘fact’. In detaching the ‘fixed’ fact ‘from the unorganised mass of the whole’ (Marx, 1975, MECW, vol.1: 233) reality, the empiricist has to ‘invent as many forces (‘fictitious’ causes) as there are empirical phenomena’ (Marx, 1975, MECW, vol.1: 233).

            Fictitious forms of causation, whether applied to the social or natural realms of concrete reality, reign supreme within those interpretations that remain enthralled by the concrete world of surface phenomena. All of these fictitious causes of the surface phenomena, including practical activities, are formulated by conscious social agents. With regard to social interaction between societal individuals, this is especially so, where the ‘intended’ action by the identified social participants has an inherent tendency to be explained by idealist formulations, where causation is exclusively perceived to be determined by the conscious aims of the participants[31]. In all of these one-sided and ‘fictitious’ interpretations, immediate intentions (which become determinate causes within idealism) strive only to have immediate consequences. On this surface level of appearances, linear cause-and-effect dominates the explanatory devices and as a consequence the perceived connections between the phenomenal surface objects of concrete reality are always external, and never internal to the whole organic totality of metabolizing processes.

However, rarely are these socio-organic processes acknowledged as being present within concrete reality because supposedly isolated entities and independent phenomena can only be externally related to each other as their autonomous anatomies are structured exclusively by inner determinants. This apparent autonomy of their existence as isolated and independently existing phenomena ‘penetrates the consciousness of acting individuals’ by suggesting that any form of relationship between surface things are essentially external[32]. Ollman brilliantly teases out the implications of these external relations:

The philosophy of external relations, which reigns in both common sense and learned discourse of our time, holds that there are both ‘things’ (the social science jargon for which is ‘factors’) and relations, but that they are logically independent of each other. Thus, in principle, the relations between two or more things can undergo dramatic changes and even disappear altogether without affecting the qualities by which we recognise these things and which we define the terms that refer to them. And the same approach is taken to the various stages through which anything passes. As with relations, change is viewed as external to the thing itself, something that happened (or will happen) to it, so that its new form is treated as independent of what it was earlier (….), rather than as an essential aspect or stage of what it is. With this way of organising reality, both perception and conception tend to concentrate on small, relatively isolated and static things, with their many relations and changes only receiving serious attention when they ‘bump’ into us (or we into them). (Ollman, 1976, 10).

 These so-called external connections have to be considered as always posited over and beyond the inner determinations of the objects compared. And what connecting determinations are located have to be a result of surface scrutiny rather than any in depth form of analysis and inevitably causation will be a one-sided and a singular formulation. This is especially so when the determination is sought under linear cause-and-effect framework. The actual separation of the surface forms of external and internal determinations completely undermines the possibility of identifying the underlying processes as being part of these determinations. Therefore, external links and connections are at most incidental or nonessential to their determinations of their existence as presumed independent entities. Therefore, what external ties that are supposed to exist between these surface objects ‘are contingent’ rather than necessary’ (Ollman, 1971, 15). Consequently, external connections can only come into play when the entities linked are falsely seen as surface phenomena and are thus thingified.

             The most limiting feature of linear cause-and-effect logic is its inherent tendency to see only immediate consequences. Remote consequences when they emerge are seen as chance events, or unintended and unfortunate side effects, which might be viewed as having a slight connection to initial action, but its precise causal determination remains unknown. So, the linear form appears to be the physical manifestation of ‘proposed aims and the results arrived at’ and is very much embedded in the capitalist mode of production as Engels states:

In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different, mainly even of quite an opposite, character; that the harmony of demand and supply  becomes transformed into its polar opposite as shown by the course of each ten years’ industrial cycle,…. (Marx and Engels, 2010c, MECW, vol.25, 463).    

To counter the one-sidedness of linear cause-and-effect, we need to begin to see beyond the surface appearance of thing-objects within the thingification process into a reality that is determined by dialectical processes. And to begin this endeavour we need to adopt the dialectical perspective by seeing the thing as a concrete passing moment (or a matrix of metabolizing processes) and thus creating the possibility of changing the ecological conditions of production and consumption of the product-thing. Marx in the following provides us with the critical insight into the dialectical double form of the thing-like phenomena:

In its mystified form, the dialectic….it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to the bourgeois and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary (Marx, Post-face to the second edition of Capital, 24 January 1873:103, Penguin).

Applying this ‘critical and revolutionary’ dialectical insight into our understanding of ‘concrete reality, it appears that the recognition of the double form[33] of existence of any entity or phenomenon, is critically important in helping us to grasp the contradictory relationship between the ‘positive understanding of what exists’ – its apparent thing-like characteristics – simultaneously with the ‘recognition of its negation’ – as a moment within a dynamic process. The ‘what exists’ level of a concrete entity is the surface appearance of things, where the thingification process apparently holds sway, while its ‘being in a fluid state, in motion’ is that same entity being determined by transient forces of determination in which the thing is embedded in underlying processes. This double form of reality can be summarized by the contradictory impulses of an entity being simultaneously a solid thing and an essential moment of a dynamic process. However, with regard to the ecological aspect of this double form of existence for the concrete phenomenon of reality, it is this notion, as highlighted by Marx, of ‘its inevitable destruction’ which locates the present of organic forces within its processes of determination. Marx brilliantly stated a similar situation when said ‘In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him (Marx, Capital, 168)[34] Thus, its thing-like existence has to be seen as a temporary reprieve – a state of momentary rest (Nicolaus) – in its necessary ecological movement towards its inevitable destruction in the social and physical process of consumption and its return as waste to the bowels of the earth.

Why Marx and Engels advocated for a dialectical science that transcends all pre-existing sciences.

The contemporary sciences, crippled as they are by their inability to come to grips with the thingification process and move beyond its conceptual constraints, will have to undergo fundamental changes in their understanding of and subsequent orientation to concrete reality, The most dramatic change as proposed by Marx and Engels is that they will need to amalgamate their efforts into one scientific endeavour in order to be able to tackle the many-sided aspects of concrete reality. Marx famously proposed such an incorporation of the sciences:

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science (Marx, 1971, 344).

However, this required all-embracing one science will by necessity undermine the intellectual and institutional detachment and independent existence of the contemporary sciences. From our analysis it should be obvious that this all-encompassing science will also need to be dialectical, in order to grasp the complexity of concrete reality. The subsequent incorporation of the dialectical engagement with the organic reality of Nature will completely transform not only the social production processes but also society’s ensuing patterns of consumption (the essential remote consequence of production). To do so, we will need to develop a co-ordinated range of planning endeavours that are embedded in not only in the production processes of society but also the process of the extraction of elementary substances from the earth as raw material, consumption and the re-entry of substance waste back into the earth. Accordingly, the range of activities to be investigated will expand beyond the immediacy of individual production processes and those expanded practices will also be extended spatially beyond the physical confines of a factory floor.

            In this dialectical planning context, it is not predetermined that all remote consequences should have detrimental effects on the ecological realm of society. If the planning is truly dialectical in its approach, it should be able to encourage an engagement in a practical activity that is not only many-sided in its determination but also many-sided in its consequences. And of course, the planned remote consequences will be beneficial to the overall functioning of the organic totality.  It is this explicit acceptance of the existence of remote consequences that moves the remit of understanding beyond the supposed thing-like events of immediate activity followed by immediate consequence into a complex organic totality of interconnecting processes and the necessary manifestation of remote consequences as surface moments of those underlying processes.

 The inherent propensity of use-value products to corrode or perish, is a constant reminder that the process of thingification is itself ironically a mere passing and temporary moment of suspension of the organic laws of Nature. Recognizing the inherent organic forces within the life cycle of a use-value product is the initial step required prior to society planning its production of its use-value products that are ecologically sustainable. The phases of this cycle include their extraction as raw material from the earth’s resources as Marx observed ‘…. the earth is the reservoir, from whole bowels the use-value is torn. (Marx, TSV part 2, 245), their production and circulation processes, and finally in their consumption and reintegration as waste back into the earth’s ‘bowels’. The essential aspect of this planning and subsequent enacting of those sustainable activities is the necessary uncovering of the inherent interconnectedness of the organic totality with regard to its diverse social forms and their organic contents of use-value products. The necessary observation and control required to sustain all aspects of this organic totality is itself determined by the essential reciprocal relationships of action/reaction between causes and consequences of this dialectically determined world. In attempting to maintain the ecological sustainability of all phases of the life cycle of the use-value product, the initially step to be taken will involve undermining the apparent dominance of thingification process within that life cycle so essential for the continuing existence of the commodity form under capitalism[35].  

The most detailed discussion of such a requirement is when Marx suggested how the scientific techniques used by capitalist agriculture has the immediate consequence of increasing the fertility of the soil but unfortunately, they also have detrimental remote consequences, whereby these same ‘scientific’ techniques are ‘ruining the long-lasting’ fertility of the soil, as he famously stated in the following: 

Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the long-lasting sources of fertility. [….] Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker (Marx, 1976, 638) (emphasis added).

This is an extraordinary example of the conceptual power of dialectical analysis to locate not only the presence of remote consequences but also establish the interconnections between two apparent discrete phenomena – the worker and the soil! And in doing so informs us how capitalism simultaneously exploits the worker and the soil. The significance of revealing this ‘consequential’ connection is quite profound. In planning to counter these forms of exploitation, Marx is proposing that the socialistic rearrangement of labour conditions is paired with the restoration of the organic sustainability of the earth’s soil. Therefore, socialism within the economy and sustainability within the soil are essential requirements to plan for, in order to free ourselves from the crushing economic and ecological fetters of Capitalism. Accordingly, Marx has brilliantly fused the necessary salvation of Nature with society by calling for the emergence of eco-socialism, and even providing some detail on what needs to be planned for to achieve such a liberating project:  

Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; achieving this with the least expenditure of energy under conditions the most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature (Marx, 1981, 820) (emphasis added).

So, Marx calls upon the ‘associated producers’ to regulate ‘rationally’ ‘their interchange with Nature’, which we believe from our discussion in this article can throw some light upon. Firstly, regulating has to mean planning production that eliminates not only the exploitation of labour but also ‘rationally regulating’ this associated form of production with organic nature. Rationally from our perspective has to be understood as dialectically rational. It is critical for the planning process that the planners understand that reality is determined by dialectically determined forces and processes and that remote consequences are the result of these forces^[36]. Secondly, this dialectically informed orientation to reality and especially to Nature allows the socialized planners to avoid the crippling hold that bourgeois misinterpretation of this concrete reality has had on the capitalist producers and their ideologues. This conceptual blindness as encapsulated in the thingification process that has resulted in not only a misinterpretation of the organic totality of Nature but also a resultant abuse of its organic forces has constantly diminished our control and mastery over those forces. And thirdly, in attempting to harness the powers of Nature for our own physical survival we have abused and subsequently misused the dialectically determined processes of Nature. This in turn has led to a vast waste of scarce natural resources and ‘expenditure of energy’ on behalf of society, which would have not occurred if we had correctly interpreted concrete reality dialectically and engaged appropriately with that reality – dialectically. And lastly, we propose that Marx’s final assertion of this quotation, creating ‘conditions the most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature (Marx, 1981, 820)’ needs to be highlighted as it captures the necessary insight that we gain from our exposition in that our ‘eternal tussle with nature’ is about not only sustaining nature but in sustaining nature we are sustaining ourselves because we possess the double form[37] which determines us as beings – ‘human nature’.

Therefore, planning our engagement with concrete reality in this context becomes more complex and comprehensive endeavour as we simultaneously include the economic and move beyond that exclusive sphere of activity into attempting to engage with Nature in a sustainable way. Planning production activity beyond the horizon of the thingification process, will entail recognizing not only that concrete reality is dialectically determined but also it will need to be able to take into account how the inherent organic forces of that dialectical reality constantly change over time within a particular bioregion. Planning in this dialectical context will therefore be far more complex than in our current capitalist setting because not only is the social aspect of production to be reformulated but also the ecological requirements of the earth’s sustainability will have to become the dominant determination over society’s production processes. Accordingly, the present-day orientation of producing use-value products through the capitalist firms will have to be recognized as a totally inappropriate institutional arrangement to engage in sustainable economic activities. The necessary elimination of the dominance of the commodity form will also get rid of the firm’s contemporary inherent self-interest to ignore the remote ecological consequences of its economic actions.  The necessary planning institutional mechanism that will have to come into existence will have to become aware and subsequently deal sustainably with all the dialectical interconnections of organic totality. To do this, it will be necessary to have at least this planning and controlling institution located in a precisely defined bioregion so that this local institution will be able to plan and co-ordinate all aspects of production and consumption under its remit. It will have to plan to deal with the appropriation of indigenous resources for the local production processes, to coordinate consumption among the local population and also to be able to organize the organic disposal of its waste. In short, the economic activities of all forms of production and consumption will have to become subservient to the overall sustainability of the local organic totality in which they are located in. Involved in this planning institution has to be the need to constantly monitor and investigate these local dialectical interconnections because of the inherent fluidity of local organic totality[38].

To reverse our current crippling relationships with the eco-systems of our earth, we need therefore to urgently reformulate and re-orientate how we engage with the natural reality of the earth’s ecosystems. This initially requires an epistemological reformulation which must include science, since science is the most effective way we make sense of the world. This necessary epistemological revolution requires us to move away from science’s current tendency of conceiving reality as thing-like to a more dialectical understanding of world, where all is connected, and this all is constantly changing. Releasing ourselves from the economic fetters of capitalism will not be sufficient in itself to save us as we also face ecological collapse of the earth’s ecosystem. To do achieve the latter, we need to become aware of the ‘thingified’ orientation present that Engels identified within natural science:

In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees. (Marx and Engels, 2010c, 23).

Obviously, these inhibiting constraints of scientific endeavour continue to exist because science is still immersed in the stupefying and befuddling thingification process. These conceptual ‘weaknesses’ have not been overcome in modernity. Levins in the following points out that these inherent epistemological problems of a ‘thingified’ science are not just of the past but are still endemic in contemporary science:

Our science still prefers the description of fixed, passive things studied in isolation to the understanding of webs of processes. But we are confronting surprising, rapid, pervasive qualitative changes. It is necessary to shift our point of view and recognize that ‘’things” are moments in the intersection of processes. (Levins, 1994, 446).

Sayer is even more precise as he relates this reifying tendency to analytic thinking:

Particular things are thus abstracted from their relations (both social and organic). The world is fragmented into a collection of disconnected atoms, related to each other only accidentally and externally. This is the way that analytic thinking also proceeds (Sayers 1990). It isolates and separates things, it abstracts them from the context of their relations and considers them apart. (Sayers, 2022, 4) (brackets included)

It could be argued that the thingification process in science today is furthered entrenched by how science is in general funded. Contemporary natural science and its effort to understand concrete reality tends to be especially orientated to provide concrete solutions to practical problems. This is so because private enterprises have sought out the sciences to help them overcome practical problems in their production activities. Consequently, much of the scientist’s unit of investigation is ‘ready-made’ for them by practical problems that have emerged on the surface level of concrete reality. Funding research by private corporations will never employ scientists to engage in pure science by investigating the essential interconnectedness of an organic totality^[39], because capitalists need to be supplied with thing-like solutions. Preferably providing the need for them to produce thing-like commodities rather than the recognition of already existing organic processes.  As a consequence, this inherent piece-meal trajectory of the sciences determines that their investigative procedures conceptually fragment the inherent totality of reality as they investigate isolated and detached phenomena. In doing so furthering of our inability to uncover the determinations of reality that are the result of the dialectical interconnectedness of concrete reality. Accordingly, their analysis of causation is not only internally orientated within the entity under examination but also this restricted form of investigation can only give a partial account of its determinations. Using Marx and Engels terminology here, natural science gives only a one-sided account of a many-sided reality. Their inherent trajectory of investigating only the conditions of discrete concrete phenomena, in effect add to the problem of comprehending the powerful forces of reality that operate throughout the workings of an organic totality. In short, because scientists do not explicitly appropriate interconnecting determinations into their analysis, their non-dialectical comprehension of reality keeps falling short and leading, according to Engels, to confusion and then finally to despair:   

But the scientists who have learnt to think dialectically are still few and far between, and hence the conflict between the discoveries made and the old traditional mode of thought is the explanation of the boundless confusion which now reigns in theoretical natural science and reduces both, teachers and students, writers and readers to despair’ (Engels, Duhring, p.26- 29).

Although the present state of science and especially its inherent thingified orientation, is not adequate to the task of saving the earth, we still need to combine planning with science to help us to co-ordinate our sustainable relationships with nature. Science is still the main medium we use to grasp the workings of reality. Engels asserts that the ‘conscious organisation of social production’ and our planned relationship to organic nature will bring in a new epoch in the historical evolution of humanity and significantly natural science will play a critical role:

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 we 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 practical application to organic nature[40]. The reasons for the need of dialectical analysis, as we have unfolded, is that the concrete reality in general and its natural form in particular, are determined by dialectical laws of evolution, which was succinctly expressed by Engels in the assertion that ‘nature works dialectically’ (Engels 1986, 24). Finally, the adoption of the dialectic, both as an ontology and epistemology, will free us and the earth’s ecosystems from the crippling impositions we impose on Nature, on account of our faulty understanding of it. However, this necessary dialectical smashing of the thingification process will not free us from the laws of Nature, according to Engels, freedom is not from the dialectical workings of Nature but to have the knowledge to act according to those laws of not just of external nature but also of human nature:

Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives to systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves – two classes of laws which can separate them from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. … Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on natural necessity. (Engels Anti-Duhring –German edition 1939, 125).

And this natural necessity is itself determined dialectically!

Conclusion

It is only when we have completed our dialectical unfolding of Marx and Engel’s understanding of the ontology of reality that we can begin to fully appreciate the significance of how a dialectical analysis can provide critical insights into the socio-natural problematic beyond the conceptual confines of non-dialectical science. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, and crucially the dialectic is not just an epistemology – a particular methodology of investigation but it is also an ontology, in which concrete reality is determined by dialectical laws. Secondly, the essential trajectory of a dialectical investigation is to seek out interconnections rather than just documenting the emergence of supposed detached phenomena, as empirical research appears to contend itself to do. Unearthing these interconnections has therefore a tendency to reveal essential relationships between apparent unconnected surface entities. Engels remark about the potential real connections between human society and a meteorite is a case in point here. Thirdly, in seeking out the dialectical laws of movement within the use-value product, which operate beyond the surface appearance of its static thing-like features, we necessarily uncover the ever-present underlying interconnecting processes. However, in doing so we also, through this same process of unfolding, uncover the innate organic/natural substrata on which capitalist society exists upon. Fourthly, the dialectic framework although it rejects the empirical oriented research’s ability to grasp the many-sided determinants of dialectical reality, it actually incorporates the findings of empirical research into its investigative procedure as it moves from the surface level of concrete reality into the determinant workings of its interconnecting processes. Consequently, the empirical surface of concrete reality and its constantly changing phenomenal forms is the necessary level of any form of analysis to begin with – scientific or dialectical. The investigative movement from the empirical surface through the analysis of forms and then onto uncovering how those determinant forms are themselves determined by dialectically interconnecting processes. This conceptual unfolding can be summarized in the following:

Empirical investigation of the surface reality will locate its thing-like phenomena^[41] – but as it only indicates their presence, it does not explain why they emerge.

Scientific analysis has an inherent tendency to uncover only the internal abstract determinations of apparently detached phenomena. It uncovers some of the determinants (classified as internal) and excluding the essential interconnecting determinations.

Dialectical analysis incorporates both the empirical and scientific/analytic levels and their subsequent forms of investigation but also crucially perceives how ‘internal’ and ‘external’ determinations are combined within interconnecting relationships. All of these determinations are inherently moments of fluid interconnecting processes.

However, as Marx famously stated that it is not sufficient to change our interpretation of reality, we need to actually change reality. But this was asserted in the context of a criticism of the academic subject of Philosophy. Nevertheless, what we have uncovered from our own explorative work here, is that to adequately appropriate dialectically determined reality in a sustainable way, it is necessary to combine both sides of the dialectic – conceptual and practical engagement. Therefore, to plan and strategize from, in a truly ecological sustainable way, it is critical to recognize the complexity of the workings of Nature. To do this, it is necessary to have prior knowledge of how nature is dialectically determined to resist falling back into the trap of thingification where the apparent concreteness of the surface reassures belief in the existence of a non-dialectical reality.  Accordingly, there is a distinction between planning as conceived by empirical orientated research and by dialectically informed research, a distinction recognized by Marx himself[42]. 

With the increasing awakening of ‘people eco-power’ among the global civil       societies, there is emerging an intensifying demand for a workable sustaining set of relationships with the earth’s ecosystems (that are dialectically determined). In various ways and from differing directions these discrete environmental campaigns are beginning to challenge the dominance of the commodity form over the ecosystems of the earth. However, these arising global eco-masses cannot achieve their goal of saving the planet, without a clear and extensive understanding of the dialectics of Nature. Anything short of adopting this dialectical world view among these global movements will ensure the continuation of a discrete thing-like ‘reality’, which will perpetuate not only the crippling dominance of the thingification process over the ecosystems of the earth but also it will undermine the unity of purpose among these eco-movements. The pinnacle of this agitation has to be the destruction of the thingified commodity form. Adopting dialectically informed strategies of engagement with concrete natural reality, will necessitate the elimination of the capitalist commodity form. As we have uncovered this social form has been instrumental in ‘thingifying’ the dynamic forces of Nature. By eliminating it entirely we will accordingly replace the individual enterprise firm as the essential producing unit of society’s use-value products. If we can initiate a dialectically informed global strategy among these mass movements which has the essential requirement of the emergence of the organic form of sustainable production will subsequently undermine the social form of the commodity and those that rely on its dominance – the capitalists.

 Consequently, in striving for an eco-sustainable world, this emerging global struggle is being fought out between all the peoples of the world and a decreasing cadre of capitalists and their ideologues. The outcome of this life-or-death conflict is whether the planet is able to survive or not as an eco-system that can sustain life on earth. Accordingly, because of the urgency of the global environmental crises, the revolutionary class struggle between the capitalist and proletariat classes will be led and dominated by the ecological concerns, which in adopting a dialectical strategy will by necessity call for the elimination of the current social form that is destroying the ecological basis of the earth – capitalism! Thus, the impetus for revolutionary change has shifted to the ecological side of the global movement for eco-socialism. Up to our present historical conjuncture, the priority for revolutionary change has come from the proletariat class struggles with capitalism but now the global eco-warriors are increasingly becoming the critical agents of freedom for both the stressed ecosystems of the earth and the exploited proletariats of capitalism. Foster grasps the same idea but more elegantly:

All material struggles are now environmental-class as well as economic-class struggles, with the separation between the two fading. More and more it is becoming clear to humanity as whole that the needed revolutionary break with the system is not simply a question of removing capitalism’s fetters on human advance, but beyond that, and more importantly, counteracting its systematic destruction of the earth as a place of habitation (and the habitation of innumerable other species) – a question of ruin or revolution. (Foster, 2022, 490).

Bibliography:

Althusser, L., E. Balibar 1998. Reading Capital. Verso Press, London.

Engels, F. 1994, Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical Philosophy 1886, Marx Engels Internet Archive.

Engels, F. 1986. Dialectics of Nature. Translated by C. Dutt. Moscow: Progress.

 Foster, J.B.  2020, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Monthly Review Press, New York

Foster, J.B. 2022, Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution. Monthly Review Press, New York.

Ilyenkov, E. 1982. The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital. Translated by

S. Kuzyakov. Moscow: Progress.

Haug, W. F. 2006.  ‘Commodity aesthetics revisited: Exchange relations as the source of antagonistic aesthetization’, Radical Philosophy 135, Jan/Feb. 18-24.

Kosik, K. 1976. Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and Society. D. Reidel Publishing Group. Boston, U.S.A.

Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. Middlesex: Penguin.

Marx, K. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by B. Fowkes. Middlesex:

Penguin.

Marx, K. 1978a. Theories of Surplus Value. Part 2 and 3. Moscow: Progress.

Marx, K. 1978b. Capital, vol. 2. Translated by D. Fernbach. Middlesex: Penguin.

Marx, K. 1981. Capital, vol. 3. Translated by D. Fernbach. Middlesex: Penguin.

Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1975. Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1. Translated by R. Dixon, J. Dirk, C. Dutt, J. Lindsay, A. West, and S. Struik. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, K. and Engels, 1975. Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3. Translated by R. Dixon, J. Dirk, C. Dutt, J. Lindsay, A. West, and S. Struik. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, K., and F. Engels. 2010b. Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 24. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, K., and F. Engels. 2010c. Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 25. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

K. Marx, and F. Engels. 1971. Ireland and the Irish Question. Translated by S. Ryazanskaya,D. Danemanis, and V.   Schneierson. Moscow: Progress.

Marx, K. 1977 [1844] ‘Economic and Philosophic manuscripts’ in Early Writings: Marx. London: Penguin Books

Ollman, B. 1976. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. 2nd ed. Cambridge:

Roth, R. 2010. “Marx on Technical Change in the Critical Tradition.” The European Journal of the

History of Economic Thought 17 (5): 1223–1251.

Sayer, S. 2022, ‘The Rational Kernal of Hegel’s Dialectic’, International Journal of Critical Thought, vol.12, no.1.24

Slater, D. 2002, Consumer Culture & Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

 Slater, E. 2021, ‘Engels on the Dialectical Ontology of Nature: Climate and the “Heavy Atlantic Rain Clouds” of Ireland’, International critical Thought, 11, (.1), 51-75.

Slater, E. 2018a. “Engels on Ireland’s Dialectics of Nature.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 29 (4):31–50.

Slater, E. 2018b. “Marx on Colonial Ireland: A Dialectical Inquiry.” History of Political Thought 39

(4): 719–748.

Slater, E. 2013, ‘Sprawling Lawns’ of the ‘Emerald Isle’ and the emergence of the aesthetic metabolic rift. Ecocriticism. 5 (2): 1-21.

Tairako, T. 2018. Reification-Thingification and Alienation – Basic concepts of Marx’s critique of Political Economy and Practical Materialism, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, vol.49, No.1: 1-28.

---

[1] The authors would like to thank John Bellamy Foster and Gerry Kearns for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

[2] John Bellamy Foster, 2020, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Monthly Review Press, New York and Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution. 2022, Monthly Review Press, New York.

[3] Engels provides more detail on this condition of one-sidedness:

If, however, we adhere one-sidedly to a single standpoint as the absolute one in contrast to the other… we shall remain entangled in the one-sidedness of metaphysical (the science of things) thinking; the inter-connection escapes us and we become involved in one contradiction after another (Engels 1986, 167).

[4]  Engels stated this in the following: ‘The first and most important qualities of matter is motion, not mechanical or mathematical movement, but still more impulse, vital life spirit, tension, …the throes of matter’ (Engels, 1986.46).

[5] Engels gives more detail in the following:

The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existences extending from stars to atoms, indeed right to either particles, in so far as one grants the existence of the last named. In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion. (Engels, 1986, 70).

[6]  Nicolaus points out the significance of the concept of moments within Marx and Engel’s dialectics:

Because movement is the only constant, Marx, like Hegel, uses the term ‘moment’ to refer to what in a system at rest would be called ‘element’ or ‘factor’. In Marx the term carries the sense both of ‘period of time’ and of ‘force of a moving mass’. (Martin Nicolaus, 1993, Foreword, 1993, 29).

[7] The key point to emphasize is that these accidental events and chance occurrences are in fact remote consequences.

[8] The recognition of double form of an entity within concrete reality is an essential conceptual tool of dialectical analysis, where an entity is conceived as having two competing and contrasting forms embedded within its particular structure. Thus, movement is observed in an apparent thing-like phenomenon.

[9] Marx did not himself use this concept, we adopted it from Tairako (2018).

[10] As Marx stated:

Labour is not source of all wealth, Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists) as labour … (Critique of the Gotha Programme).

[11] Sean Sayer actually suggests that this aspect of the thingification process can be identified within the Enlightenment thinkers:

As William James says, “Ordinary empiricism . . . has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things” (James 1912, 42–43). Locke puts the point succinctly. “Relation,” he writes, is “not contained in the real existence of things, but [is] something extraneous and superinduced” (Locke 1924, II.25.8). Things have their nature purely in themselves on this view, quite independently of their relations to other things. The effect of such views is to see things, as Hume (1894, para. 58) puts it, as “loose and separate . . . conjoined but never connected.” (Sayers, 2022, 4).

[12] This presentation attempts to reflect the logic that Marx presented in Grundrisse in the section entitled – The General relation of production to distribution, exchange, consumption (Marx, 1993, 88).

[13] The social here refers to how Marx identified how labour provides a social form to the material contents of the product.

[14] However, in our domestic activities of housekeeping (long-run consumption) we preserve the thing-like forms of our household inanimate consumer goods by maintaining their appearance and the physical integrity through cleaning, washing and dusting them.

[15] It could be argued that that those thing forms are simultaneously both determined by underlying processes but also they function themselves as essential moments of those processes. In short, they are mediated and mediate.

[16] The aesthetic branding of a product is essentially about embedding shapes and signs (both written and symbolic) onto its surface form that emanate a mental image which attempts to insert the commodity product into a lifestyle narrative – attaching ‘extraneous meanings to basically functional objects’ (Slater, 2002, 136). In short, the physical surface of the use-value product becomes a mode of representation of an aesthetic moment in an idealized cultural process that ‘exists’ beyond the immediacy of its existence as a medium of representation. The front lawn is a good example of this (Slater,2013).

[17] The surface appearance of apparent ‘restfulness’ and lifelessness have to be considered as critical defining characteristics of the thing-like form.

[18] Sayer expressed the same contradiction in the following way:

This is not to deny that things can also be fixed and stationary. But such states are relative and temporary. Nothing concrete remains the same forever. Change and motion are inherent in all things. (Sayers, 2022, 5).

[19] Rain 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 metabolizing matrix of the organic interconnecting processes within the Irish weather system.  

[20] Engels stated it this way: ‘As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers’ (Engels, 1986, 183).

[21] John Bellamy Foster

[22] What is becoming obvious in these examples is how the various participants, across differing global locations and historical timeframes, who are involved in these short-run financial gain ventures appear to be unable or unwilling to foresee the remote disastrous ecological consequences of their economically inspired activities.

[23] Engels used the same examples:

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 forlorn state of those countries (Engels, 1986, 180).

Engels is not just noting the occurrence of remote consequences due to deforestation but also how those consequences has long lasting effect on those societies, even to the present day.

[24] Marx distinguishes agricultural cultivation from industrial production with regard to society’s ability to control their differing conditions of production: 

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).

[25]In this case, the adoption of the potato allowed the colonial rental process to further extract surplus labour from their tenantry but it simultaneously restricted their subsistence diet to one staple food. When the potato blight struck as it did throughout the countries of Europe, it destroys the entire food supply to the Irish peasantry but not so the lower classes of Europe (Slater,2018b).

[26] Causation does not necessarily have to be consciously constructed as fictitious. By simply explicating one determination only as would be the case for linear cause-and-effect epistemological framework, the consequential one-sidedness of this form of analysis is conceptually inadequate to grasp the complexity of a multi-sided reality.

[27] Marx stated how the ready-made things come about:

These ready-made relations and forms, which appear as pre-conditions in real production because the capitalist mode of production moves within forms it has created itself and which are its results, confront it equally as ready-made pre-conditions in the process of reproduction (Marx, TSV, part 3, 485).

[28] But Capitalism is not alone in this regard as Engels suggests:

All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labour. The further consequences, which appear only later and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected. (Engels, 1986, 181/2).

Because none of those historical modes were able to crack the dialectical code.

 

[30] It might be conceptually possible to flip the inherent trajectory of this conceptual understanding of concrete reality from its idealistic formulation to a materialist activity where the physical extraction of the ‘fluid essence’ of concrete reality takes on the physical form of a thing-like object. In doing so, the physical process of extraction in its thing-like form severs that newly formed object from its original source of its organic being within a natural organic totality.

[31] Linear cause-and-effect logic when seen from within the societal context will inevitably highlight the conscious rationality of the involved social agents and will therefore only concentrate on the effectiveness of their declared rationalities exclusively (Weber’s problematic).

[32] Marx stated this in the following way:

….acquires it’s externalised independent aspect. It is an independent form only in its externalisation, in its complete separation from its antecedents. (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3.484).

[33] A good informative example of the dual or double form is Pareto’s summary of Marx’s use of words – ‘Marx’s words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice’ (Ollman, 1976, .3).

[34] This assertion was accompanied by a following footnote, in which Marx quoted Engels – ‘What are we to think of a law which can only assert itself through periodic crises? It is just a natural law which depends on the lack of awareness of the people who undergo it’ (Engels, MECW, vol.3, 1975, 433)

[35] Accordingly, the commodity form raises the thing form of the product to a position of dominance over all the other moments of the life cycle, because the realization of the commodity can only occur within a thingified form, whether real or fictitious.

[36] Accordingly, science needs to be similarly directed by this epistemological understanding of concrete reality, a reality determined by dialectical laws, where this dialectical awareness is the essential and necessary orientation. 

[37] A good informative example of the dual or double form is Pareto’s summary of Marx’s use of words – ‘Marx’s words are like bats: one can see in them both birds and mice’ (Ollman, 1976, 3).

[38] It is fascinating to speculate that these rural based planning institutions may become the intellectual centres of the future in contrast to how the contemporary ‘historical motive power of society’ (Marx, 1976, 637) is concentrated in urban centres.

[39] Marx identified how capital relates to science:

‘….and all of the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital, …. Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it (Marx, Grundrisse, 704).

[40] As Engels states:

But it is precisely dialectics that constitutes the most important form of thinking for the present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another (Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 43).

[41] Engels stated the following:

 It was necessary first to examine things before it was possible to examine processes. One had first to know what any particular thing was before one could observe the changes it was undergoing. (Engels, 1886, Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical Philosophy 384).

[42] In a letter to Engels Marx stated:

The position is difficult. To pursue an entirely correct course would require a much more critical and dialectical skill than our Wilhelm possesses. (Marx to Engels, 17 December 1867)

Uncover their insights into the intricate interplay between society and nature within Irish historical contexts.

---

Rundale Agrarian Commune: Marx and Engels on primitive communism in Ireland and its internal dynamics

Dr. Eamonn Slater, Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland. Funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Word count ABSTRACT: In the following account we apply a Marxist…

Continue Reading Rundale Agrarian Commune: Marx and Engels on primitive communism in Ireland and its internal dynamics

The ‘Collops’of the Rundale: their evolving ecological and communal forms.

Dr. Eamonn Slater, Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland. Number of Words: 1650Estimated Reading Time: ~8-10 minutes Introduction In this article, I want to outline the crucial role that the administrative device of…

Continue Reading The ‘Collops’of the Rundale: their evolving ecological and communal forms.

The Sprawling Global Lawns of the Emerald Isle: A Dialectical Unfolding.

Dr. Eamonn Slater. Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland. Key words: Marx, labour process, metabolic rift, Benjamin, aesthetic veneer, externalisation. Number of Words:Estimated Reading Time: ~ 0 – 0 minutes Abstract: This article explores…

Continue Reading The Sprawling Global Lawns of the Emerald Isle: A Dialectical Unfolding.

The Suburban front Garden – a spatial entity determined by social and natural processes.

Eamonn Slater and Michel Peillon. Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland. KEY WORDS: society-nature relationships, space, visuality, gardening, labour processes. Number of Words:Estimated Reading Time: ~ 0 – 0 minutes ABSTRACT…

Continue Reading The Suburban front Garden – a spatial entity determined by social and natural processes.

Reconstructing ‘Nature’ as a Picturesque theme park: The colonial case of Ireland.

Dr. Eamonn Slater, Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland. Number of Words: 7065Estimated Reading Time: ~28-35 minutes This article explores how a form of visuality—the picturesque—became the essential framework for the…

Continue Reading Reconstructing ‘Nature’ as a Picturesque theme park: The colonial case of Ireland.

Marx on colonial Ireland: the dialectics of colonialism

Dr. Eamonn Slater (Department of Sociology, Maynooth University) 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…

Continue Reading Marx on colonial Ireland: the dialectics of colonialism

Marx on Nineteenth Century Colonial Ireland: Analyzing Colonialism as a Social Process.

Eamonn Slater (Department of Sociology, Maynooth University) and Terrence McDonough (Department of Economics, NUIGalway). Abstract In this article, we explore the possibility that Marx had a far more complex understanding of the colonialization…

Continue Reading Marx on Nineteenth Century Colonial Ireland: Analyzing Colonialism as a Social Process.

How Engels and Marx analysed climate and climate change dialectically.

Dr. Eamonn Slater, Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland. KEYWORDS: climate system, dialectical nature, interconnecting processes, deforestation, desertification, immediate and remote consequences, Ireland.. Word count 7,850. As ‘Nature works dialectically’, Engels and…

Continue Reading How Engels and Marx analysed climate and climate change dialectically.

Marx on the colonization of Irish soil.

Marx on the colonization of Irish soil Eamonn Slater Department of Sociology, Maynooth University   Estimated reading time: 60 minutes. Contains 21150 words. Abstract This paper explores how Marx conceptualised the presence of soil exhaustion…

Continue Reading Marx on the colonization of Irish soil.

Report of a speech by Karl Marx

International Workingmen’s Association 1867 Record of Speech by Karl Marx On the Irish Question Source: MECW Volume 21, p. 317;First published: in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 2nd Russian Edition, 1960. This record…

Continue Reading Report of a speech by Karl Marx

Record of speech by Karl Marx

International Workingmen’s Association 1867 Record of Speech by Karl Marx On the Irish Question Source: MECW Volume 21, p. 317;First published: in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 2nd Russian Edition, 1960. This record of Marx’s speech on the…

Continue Reading Record of speech by Karl Marx

Outline of a Report on the Irish Question to the CEA of German Workers in London

Karl Marx the Outline of SpeechDecember 1867 Number of Words: 1,950Estimated Reading Time: ~8-10 minutes On the Irish Question: A Report by Karl Marx (1867) Editor’s Note: In December 1867, Karl Marx delivered a detailed…

Continue Reading Outline of a Report on the Irish Question to the CEA of German Workers in London

Engels on Ireland’s Dialectics of Nature

Dr. Eamonn Slater, Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland. Key words: dialectics, metabolizing organic processes, natural conditions, Ireland. Word count Abstract: This article surveys an unpublished piece in which Engels examined the…

Continue Reading Engels on Ireland’s Dialectics of Nature

Engels and Marx on dialectically determined reality and the dire consequences for Nature of our failure to recognize it.

Eamonn Slater and Eoin Flaherty Department of Sociology, Maynooth University. Number of Words: 20021Estimated Reading Time: ~80 minutes    3.5.2024.  (Working version, being edited) Engels and Marx on dialectically determined realityDownload The ‘bewitched’ world of…

Continue Reading Engels and Marx on dialectically determined reality and the dire consequences for Nature of our failure to recognize it.

---

---

Introduction

In this article, I want to outline the crucial role that the administrative device of the collop played in the Rundale system of farming. Although it was essentially a measurement of agricultural productivity, it was unique in the way it assessed ecological output and allowed that output to be communally shared among the residents of a Rundale clachan. And in this latter respect, it provides us with an invaluable insight into not only the inner workings of this communal system of production but also into how production from ‘commons’ lands can be assessed ecologically. Accordingly, by comparing the collop method of measurement with the imperial system of spatial measurement – acreage – we can begin to understand how the ‘acre’ system was an imposition onto the local ecosystems while the collop emerged organically from the naturally occurring ecological soil base. Finally, I unfold how the acre unit system was used to impose a rent on the Rundale lands, while the collop was used to proportion that rent among the members of the commune.

In the following quotation, Gibbs locates the significance of the collop as a measurement of land among the native Irish and how it was integrated under the newly introduced rental system in the seventeenth century:

“Four men of the village, he (Sir Henry Piers) says, called Heads of Quarter, obtained the lease of a farm consisting of arable and grazing land, and then took in a number of others as co-partners. The farm was valued according to the number of cows for which there was grazing ground, the grazing of a cow being called a collop. Each partner paid rent in proportion to the number of collops he held; but their cattle fed in common. The arable land was divided into as many portions as there were collops, and each had as many portions as he held collops. The land was re-divided every two years, and in such a manner that it consisted of various qualities of good, of middling, and of bad, in different parts of the field. The four adjusted the collops, and the shares of the arable land among the other partners; they collected the rents, and paid the landlord.”

What is interesting about Gibbs’ succinct synopsis of the concept of the collop is how he suggests that it originated from the grazing activities of cattle but later was applied to tillage land as ‘the arable land was divided into as many portions as there were collops, and each had as many portions as he held collops’. These tillage portions were subsequently known as tillage collops. This article is an attempt to develop these insights of Gibbs and to suggest that the collop was the essential organizational apparatus that was crucial to maintaining communal aspects of the Rundale system. And like the Rundale system itself, the collop evolved through time and took on a number of diverse forms. But all of these forms of collops that were instrumental in maintaining productive communality had also to operate under a rental system. In this relationship, they functioned as a means of proportioning the rent payments among the communal members of the Rundale system. And in doing so, the collop became the pivotal point where the rental system of landlordism attempted to subsume the customary relationships of the communal form of production. Gibbs’ account in the above quotation thus begins to explicate how the collop is crucial in our attempt to understand not only the inner workings of this particular system of agricultural production but also how the Rundale members organized their payment of the rent.

Integrating the Rundale System as a Townland Within the Landed Estate Framework

The setting up of a leasehold agreement de nova was rarely done on land that was not already populated by the native Irish. The Plantations of the seventeenth century and the colonial strategy of clearing the Irish natives from the land and replacing them with British tenants was an abject failure except for the Ulster Plantation. As a consequence, the commoners of the dismantled tribal system had to be readmitted back onto the land – not as tribal members but as rent-paying tenants. This process of re-admittance was in fact a legal fiction as the native Irish never actually left their ancestral lands but legally they became tenants of a newly established land-owning Anglo-Irish elite. The consequence of this legal imposition is that the native Irish were now required to pay a monied rent but their traditional customary practices of production continued although they were now formally part of the newly established landed estate. It is within these landed estate property restrictions that booleying and its specific form of valuation – the collop emerged within the Rundale system of farming. Thus the synthesis of these formal legal strictures associated with the colonial

landed estate and the informal customary practices of the Rundale system of farming was a dynamic process that was continually evolving.

The Livestock Collop as a Measurement of Pasture Productivity

The livestock collop was essentially a measure of the productivity of the pasture in terms of the number of cattle that it could sustain over the grazing period. It was not a measure of the spatial extent of the land. The productivity of the pasture was ecologically determined by the fertility of the soil and the vegetative growth that it could support. The collop was thus an ecological measure of the land’s productivity.

The Tillage Collop within and beyond the Infield

The tillage collop was an extension of the livestock collop into the arable infield. It was a response to the demographic pressures on the land and the need to produce cereal crops. The tillage collop was a measure of the productivity of the infield in terms of the number of families that it could sustain. It was not a measure of the spatial extent of the infield. The productivity of the infield was ecologically determined by the fertility of the soil and the vegetative growth that it could support. The tillage collop was thus an ecological measure of the land’s productivity.

The Colliding ‘Worlds’ of the Rented Acre and the Communal Collop

The rented acre was the spatial measure of the land that was used in the official transactions of the landed estate. The Rundale residents, however, calculated their holdings in terms of collops. The rent for the townland was fixed as a whole but the distribution of that rent among the residents was managed through the collop system. The collop was thus the measure of the land that reflected the blend of the imposed legal structures of the landed estate and the customary communal practices of the Rundale system.

In conclusion, the collop system was an ingenious method of integrating ecological understanding with communal living. It stands in stark contrast to the imposed acreage system. It represents a historical synthesis of environmental stewardship and social organization that has much to teach us about contemporary ecological and communal endeavors.

Endnotes:

Buchanan stated that:

Their land lay mainly within a single townland, a territorial unit whose mean size for the country is about 325 acres. If the townland was large, it was sometimes divided among several Rundale groups, each holding its land in lots separate from the other (Buchanan 1973: 586)

References

Buchanan, R. 1973. ‘Field Systems of Ireland’, in A. R. Baker and R A Butlin (ed). Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles. Cambridge. CUP.
Coll, F.1990 ‘An Account of Life in Machaire (Magheragallan) Early this Century’ Ulster Folklife: 36.

Corduff, M. 2014. ‘Rundale in Rossport, Co. Mayo’ (Present volume)
Doran, H. 2000, The Outer Edge of Ulster: A memoir of social life in nineteenth-century Donegal.Lilliput Press, Dublin.
Evans. E. 1967, Irish Heritage: The Landscape, The People and Their Work. Dundalk, Dundalgan Press
Gibbs, F. 1870. English Law and Irish Tenure. London: W. Ridgeway.
Knight, P. 1836. Erris in the Irish Highlands and the Atlantic Railway. Dublin: M. Keene. Mac Carthaigh, C. 1999. ‘Clare Island Folklife’, in C. Mac Carthaigh and Kevin Whelan (ed). New Survey of Clare Island: History and Cultural Landscape, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. McCourt, D. 1955 ‘Infield and Outfield in Ireland’ Economic History Review. (7) 3. McCourt, D. 1981. ‘Decline of the Rundale, 1750–1850’, in P.Roebuck (ed), Plantation to Partition, Essays in Ulster History. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.
O’Danachair, C. 1983 ‘Summer pasture in Ireland’ Folk Life, 22.
O’Dubhtaigh ‘Summer Pasture in Donegal’
Otway, C. 1841. Sketches in Erris and Tyrawly. Dublin: William Curry.
Tighe W. 1802 Statistical Observations relating to the county of Kilkenny. Dublin: Graisberry & Campbell.
Slater E. and McDonough T. 1994 ‘Bulwark of Landlordism and Capitalism: The Dynamics of Fuedalism in Nineteenth Century Ireland’ Research in Political Economy.vol.14.

FAQ for “The Collops of the Rundale”

---

---

The original source PDF is available for print and download.

---

ABSTRACT: In the following account we apply a Marxist ‘mode of production’ framework that attempts to create a better understanding of the complex relationships between society and nature. Most of the discussion of the dualism of nature/society has tended to replicate this divide as reflected in the intellectual division between the natural sciences and the social sciences. We hope to cross this analytic divide and provide an analysis that incorporates both natural and social variables. Marx’s work on ecology and ‘mode of production’ provides us with the theoretical framework forour examination into the essential structures of the Irish rundale agrarian commune. His analysis of modes of production includes not only social relations (people to people) but also relations of material appropriation (people to nature) and therefore allows us to combine the social forces of production with the natural forces of production. The latter relations are conceptualized by Marx as mediated through the process of metabolism, which refers to the material and social exchange between human beings and nature and vice-a-versa. However, what is crucial to Marx is how the natural process of metabolism is embedded in its social form – its particular mode of production. Marx suggested that this unity of the social and the natural was to be located within the labour process of the particular mode of production and he expressed this crucial idea in the concept of socio-ecological metabolism. Some modes of production such as capitalism create a rift in the process of metabolism. The metabolic rift is a disruption of the soil nutrient cycle as nutrients are removed from the soil when they pass into the crops and animals and are not returned. Declining soil fertility therefore becomes a social/economic problem for society.

University

It is not a question here of definitions, which things must be made to fit. We are dealing here with definite functions, which must be expressed, in definite categories. Karl Marx Capital,
vol. 2.

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. And this implies, finally, that in Marx’s Capital we shall find a continuous ‘oscillation between essence and appearance’. Banaji 1979.

1. Introduction

The rundale system has proven elusive and divisive as a topic of study since the emergence of interest toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Historically, the rundale system occupied a large spatial area in pre-Famine Ireland. For instance, Almquist suggests that 58% of all the land in Co. Mayo in 1845 was held in common by joint tenancies (Almquist 1977: 103). According to McCourt, the rundale system, as indicated by clachan settlements, was concentrated in a crescent that included the north, west, and south-west (McCourt 1971: 136). Freeman estimated that in 1845 on the eve of the Great Famine the rundale system occupied some 2,000,000 acres of land (Freeman 1965: 180). Despite the empirical depth of this interest, much subsequent scholarship has tended toward analyses ranging from empiricist, to idealist, to reductionist. Consequently, we are no closer to a shared consensus on the origins, and internal dynamics of the rundale system as it existed throughout both recorded, and pre-history. This paper is an attempt to incorporate, criticise, and develop the confines of the approaches outlined above, through a re-visitation of the later anthropological readings of Karl Marx on the agrarian commune in European context. Our discussion will attempt to introduce, through a ‘mode of production’ analysis, a theoretical understanding of the internal dynamics, and individual/communal tensions inherent within the rundale, that have determined, at a general level, the specific form of its productive, social and spatial relations. In doing so, we proceed through numerous ideal-typical analytical dimensions, to arrive at an understanding of the dialectical relationship between the rundale [primitive] communal mode of production, and its concomitant ecosystem. This necessary abstraction is an attempt to resolve analytical problems inherent within studies of such empirically elusive subjects, as McCourt has suggested;

to get a proper picture of the Irish open-field system, it is best not to think of a homogeneous population at a given time, but of one exhibiting manifold features of variation inside a framework of broad similarity. (McCourt 1947: 1)

In his introduction to Marx’s Ecology, Foster (2002) stated that ‘…to be truly meaningful, the dialectical conception of a totality in the process of becoming …had to be placed in a practical, materialist context’ (Foster 2002: 5). Contrary to this suggested approach, ‘mainstream’ sociological inquiry concerned with the analysis of human-natural relations has tended to proceed in the opposite direction, maintaining an analytical separation between the social, and the natural.1 The effects of this separation have amounted to what Benton describes as an ‘obstructive dualism’, within which non-social entities remain beyond the remit of sociological inquiry (Benton 1991: 7). Despite notable contributions from the aforementioned authors,2 the state of research from within the social sciences has remained largely conceptual. Consequently, little attempt has been made to reconcile such restrictive dualisms within a particular case study. The case of the rundale agrarian commune, therefore, is presented in an attempt to resolve both deficiencies in our knowledge of the internal dynamics of the system itself within its broader context, and to overcome these separations through a mode of production analysis.

2. The Contrasting Conceptualizations of Academic Scholarship on the Rundale System: either Overculturalized or Overspatialized

To date, the most prolific debates on the rundale system have concerned theories of its origins, most often expressed as a conflict between, on the one hand, documentary and archaeological evidence and, on the other, supposedly epistemologically inferior ethnological work. The nature of this debate has hinged on the widely-contested notion of the antiquity of the rundale system, and its concomitant pattern of nucleated settlement. Institutional Irish scholarship on the rundale system and clachan finds its roots in the Queen’s school of Historical Geography; most notably the contentions raised by Estyn Evans’s 1939 paper ‘Some Survivals of the Irish Openfield System’ and, years later, the work of Desmond McCourt. Evans’s prominence is reflected in Whelan’s description of his rejection many years later by historical geographers as ‘discarding some of the most venerable concepts in Irish geography’ (Whelan 1999: 187). Given the unfortunate scarcity of documentary sources detailing the rundale system in comprehensive detail, and the extent to which the work of the Queen’s geographers3 dominates our empirical knowledge, it is necessary to critically assess their work and the more recent revisiting of the rundale by their later geographer colleagues.

In a comment originally made in 1981, Evans stated that his ‘particular brand of anthropogeography, which is that of H.J. Fleure and Carl O. Sauer, [was] currently out of fashion’ (1992: 1). According to Graham, Evans’s life work remained preoccupied, for the most part, with intent to document the ‘undocumented’, his writings remaining rooted within a holistic regional framework and legitimating a distinctively Darwinian interpretation of ‘regional particularities’.4 McCarthy notes that, methodologically, ‘Evans … felt that the landscape was the best tool for conducting research’ (2002: 543). It was this combination of theoretical influences and methodological diversity that led Evans to conclude that the rundale system and its contemporary survivals, as evidenced in folk accounts of practices remaining in memory, constituted a system of great antiquity with potential origins in the early Iron Age (Evans 1939: 24). Connections between the eighteenth and nineteenth century rundale system and its hypothesized Celtic counterpart were thus established on the basis of extrapolation from contemporary field evidence, incorporating both archaeological and folklore data.5

In a series of papers delivered to the Geographical Society of Ireland, Andrews (1974, 1977) criticized what he saw as the homogenizing effect of studies, such as those of Evans, conducted within a ‘regional personality construct’.6 Buchanan later noted that, despite criticisms to the contrary, such formulations were essential to ‘make connections across great distances of time and space, to stress ecological settings … and to show the relevance of space-relations in the evolution of culture’ (Buchanan 1984: 133). Whelan and Doherty provide potent criticisms of Evans in this respect, by noting that Evans’s work claimed to produce a study of settlement, which offered a direct window to a form of great antiquity, empirically rooted (if limited to a Western-Atlantic fringe context). According to Whelan, Evans’s idealist model engendered a sense of a peasant world as:7

… fundamentally a timeless one, a little tradition which endured through the centuries, and with underlying continuities with remote pre-history … by studying these timeless survivals in the modern world, one could trace the whole sweep of Irish settlement history from its genetic origins in prehistory. (Whelan, 1999: 187)

Citing ‘numerous subtle and political and philosophical differences’, Graham (1994: 194) rejects the notion of a distinctively ‘Evans school’ of geography and suggests that McCourt’s approach departs significantly from that of Evans. Throughout his writings, McCourt maintains a separation between the ‘rundale’ as social practice, as spatial configuration (the clachan), and as a system of infield-outfield cultivation (McCourt 1971, 1955). McCourt’s approach arrives at a dynamic conceptualization of ‘the rundale’: ‘Not [as] a homogeneous population at a given time, but … one exhibiting manifold features of variation inside a framework of broad similarity’ (1947: 1), and in its broader historical context as ‘scattered dwellings and compact farm units … [with the] possibility of the former at any time evolving into or emerging from the latter’ (1971: 127).

McCourt of course is right to emphasize the dynamic nature of the rundale, but we suggest that it involves more than just physical settlement patterns – rotating from scattered dwellings to compact farms. If this is a feature of change within the rundale system, the conditions that allow such a strange pattern to emerge need to be investigated.

Kevin Whelan has developed a perspective on the rundale system in terms of its adaptability to nuances of context (environment), particularly the marginal conditions of the western seaboard within which the rundale system thrived (Whelan 1995, 1999). Whelan’s approach marks a significant departure from previous pronouncements on the emergence, nature and antiquity of the rundale system, by depicting it as a functional adaptation to specific ecological conditions. But this approach is very close to a form of environmental determinism, which has a consequential tendency to underplay the complexity of the social determinisms, especially the social relationships within the rundale.

Countering Whelan’s adaptive determinism is Yager’s culturalism. Writing on the village of Faulmore, Co. Mayo in 1976, Yager commented that ‘… its palpable collective spirit led me to suspect that a more thorough-going communalism lurked in the past’ (Yager 2002: 154), concluding:

It is safe to assume that co-operative work ties were cemented by a strong sense of neighbourly affiliation and a lively evening social life, as I saw myself in Faulmore in the

4

1970s. Rundale was more than a technical arrangement; it was a way of life. (Yager 2002: 162)

Yager concludes that a utilitarian ‘group mind’ formed the basis of the rundale system, thereby idealizing communality at the level of interpersonal interaction, and perhaps over-emphasizing the historical permanence of collective sentiment.8 This charge has underpinned much of the debate over the antiquity and subsequent emergences of rundale throughout history, in the issue of the validity of evidence- forms (McCarthy 2002: 534). It has been noted by various authors (Graham 1994: 184; Crossman and McLoughlin 1994: 80, 89; Nash 2005: 52) that critiques themselves are contested knowledge forms, constituted within particular parameters of appropriate academic practice.

In situating the origins and trajectory of the development of the rundale system, therefore, we are left with a body of material situated within a philosophical and methodological debate of polar opposites: those of ‘anthropogeographic’extrapolation from fieldwork on surface features both material and cultural (those associated with the ‘Evans school’), against an adherence to formal (spatial) documentation (Andrews). Consequently, we are left with an idealist-reductionist dichotomy in our literature corresponding to the authors located within the respective opposing positions above: idealist to the extent that the supposed antiquity of the rundale system emerges within a framework of anthropogeographic generalization,9 and reductionist to the extent that its form, function, and origins may only be understood through abstract spatial units,10 and within a deterministic framework of functional adaptation. In this respect, McCourt’s approach held greater promise for reconciling these contested aspects, as his analysis had already moved far beyond Evans’s initial hypotheses and provided for the possibility of a number of context- dependent rundale emergence scenarios, and, as we will see, for a number of mechanisms of decline and re-emergence over time.

Evans employed a particular methodology with the explicit aim of overcoming what he saw as the ‘arid minutia of an elaborate bibliographical apparatus’ (1992: 15). In this respect, and as noted by Graham, subsequent historical-geographical criticisms were notably deficient in their ability to cope with social structures and even more so social processes, through an over-reliance on privileged documentary sources (Graham 1994: 194, Crossman and McLoughlin 1994: 87). Notwithstanding Evans’s own inability to cope with the diversity of social structures in rural Ireland (especially class), his comment that ‘one must admire these scholarly aims so long as curiosity is not stifled by technique, and the scaffolding does not obscure the building’ (Evans 1981: 15) lends further credence to the argument for a theoretical, systemic development of discussion of the rundale and a revision of the conceptual constraints implicit within critiques from an empiricist-spatial tradition.11

More recently, James Anderson identified the contradictory tendencies of the rundale system with regard to the contrasting values of communal and individualistic attitudes:

(Rundale) was based more on communal than on individual enterprise, originally in kinship groups, later on partnership farms. Co-operation and equity were among the guiding principles, though by the nineteenth century … more competitive and individualistic attitudes often prevailed. (Anderson 1995: 448).

We want to argue that these contrasting tendencies do not just operate on the level of the psychological mind-set of the participants but are actually determinants of the

5

diverse economic and social structures of this agrarian system. The aforementioned frameworks applied to the rundale have failed to examine the internal processes that have determined how the rundale system has gone through many metamorphoses – it was never a timeless entity. To unlock the unity of these diverse forms, we turn to Marx to provide us with the materialistic key.

3. Marx (and Engels) on the Agrarian Commune

According to John Maguire, Marx proposed a typology of agrarian communal forms in which communal property is combined with private property in varying combinations. These types are identified by Maguire in the works of Marx as the Oriental or Asiatic, the Ancient and the Germanic forms of agrarian communities. These primitive forms of community have evolved from an archaic form in which communal property existed without private property (Maguire 1978: 212). Marx stated this evolutionary tendency in the agrarian communal forms in the following way and suggested that the Russian commune is a variant of the Germanic form:

Primitive communities are not all cut according to the same pattern. On the contrary, they form a series of social groups which, differing in both type and age, make successive phases of evolution. One of the types, conventionally known as agrarian commune, (la commune agricole), also embraces the Russian commune. Its equivalent in the West is the very recent Germanic commune. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 118)

Marx in his unsent letter drafts to Vera Zasulich classified the Russian commune as the latest developed form of communal property – developed from its earlier archaic form. It had three main characteristics:

1. The Russian variant of the agrarian commune was ‘the first social group of free men not bound together by blood ties’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 119), while the archaic community was determined by close blood relations between its members.
2. In the agrarian commune the house and garden yard belong to the individual farmer, while in the more ‘archaic’ type of village community there was no private ownership at all.
3. The cultivable land, ‘inalienable and common property’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 119), is periodically divided among the communal members, each of whom works his own plot and appropriates its fruits.

Marx suggested that inherent in these three concrete characteristics is a ‘dualism’ which ‘bestows the agrarian commune with a vigorous life’. This dualism is based on the opposing trends of individualism and communality where, in the case of the Germanic/Russian commune, the house and garden yard was the private preserve of the individual family and subsequently ‘fostered individuality’ and the rest of the commune’s land was for communal use. In the third draft of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich,12 according to Shanin’s re-ordering of their presentation, we have the most theoretically developed conceptualization of the agrarian commune by Marx. In this draft, Marx seems to be attempting to bring out the dialectical moments (and contradictions) inherent in the continuing evolving relationship of communality and individualism and their varying concrete manifestations.13 In attempting to explain these moments he uses a variety of concrete categories to identify the differing relationship that the dualism conveys on the social relations of production. Individualism is expressed through the use of such categories as personal, individual,

6

private and property (private). These are contrasted on the communal side of the dualism with categories such as collective, communal, common and co-operative. All of these adjectives are applied across various moments of the social relationships of production.14 Those categories which attempt to conceptualize the impact of individualism on the immediate production process generally suggest a process of disintegration, e.g. fragmented, scattered, petty and parcellized. The tremendous variety of categories used by Marx in these drafts suggests that he had a very deep understanding of the complex nature of the evolution of the agrarian commune from its archaic form of prehistory to its contemporary variant forms – Oriental, Germanic, Russian (and Rundale). The problem as Marx saw it was that their evolution and devolved essential structures varied considerably from location to location.15 What is definite is that Marx sees them emerging from a common archaic form which he identified as primitive communal property:

It (primitive communal property) is (not) a specifically Slavonic, or even an exclusively Russian, phenomenon. It is an early form which can be found among Romans, Teutons and Celts, and of which a whole collection of diverse patterns (though sometimes only remnants survive) is still in existence in India. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 49)

What remnants remain of communal property depended on how the process of individualization had eroded the communal aspects of the commune. Consequently, the dualism of communality and individualism allows the researcher to assess the degree of communal disintegration. And, crucially, the comparative aspect of this procedure of assessment revolves around the concept of property (communal and private) and how it relates to concrete spatial forms which were under the auspices of the agrarian commune. In the original archaic form of the commune, all land was communal; so, emerging from that communal property base meant an increasing integration of private property over the communal lands. Therefore, the concepts of communal and private property are phenomenal forms which operate at the concrete level, while the concepts of communality and individualism are abstract formulations since they are part of a concealed ‘inner dualism’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 104). As part of the hidden essential structure of the commune, they, as abstract concepts, are the initial concepts used by Marx to uncover the determining laws and tendencies of this particular mode of production. In the following, Marx’s draft highlights the concreteness of the property relationships and the analytical role of the ‘inner’ dualism:

It is easy to see that the dualism inherent in the ‘agricultural commune’ may give it a sturdy life: for communal property and all the resulting social relations provide it with a solid foundation, while the privately owned houses, fragmented tillage of the arable land and the private appropriation of its fruits all permit a development of individuality incompatible with conditions in the more primitive communities. It is just as evident that the very same dualism may eventually become a source of disintegration. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 109)

It is crucially important to observe not only how the abstract dualism manifests itself in the concrete forms of the changing property relationships (concrete dualism which we would expect to exist within the spatial plane) but also how that abstract dualism incorporates production and consumption relationships. Therefore, the abstract dualism of communality and individualism merely gets us under the surface of the agrarian commune to uncover a possible structural link between the communal property relationships and production relations; it does not provide us with a dynamic conceptualization which can explain change in this particular mode of production.

7

As a consequence, the dualisms of individuality and communality and communal and private properties provide us with simple classification devices that can highlight how far the particular commune under examination has moved on from its archaic origins. These classification procedures operate essentially at the level of the spatial, although the more abstract dualism of communality and individualism appears to be moving towards incorporating production and consumption relationships as well. In the following, Marx discusses how this dualism has had a dissolving effect on the stability of the commune:

It is no less evident, however, that this very dualism could eventually turn into the seeds of disintegration. Apart from all the malignant outside influences, the commune bore within its own breast the elements that were poisoning its life. (Marx 1983: 120)

This was especially so, according to Marx, when labour was engaged on individually- held plots and the subsequent fruits of that private labour were enjoyed by the individual and his immediate family.

It gave rise to the accumulation of movable goods such as livestock (and) money … Such movable property, not subject to communal control, open to individual trading in which there was plenty of scope for trickery and chance, came to weight heavily upon the entire rural economy … It introduced heterogeneous elements into the commune, provoking conflicts of interest and passion liable to erode communal ownership first of the cultivable land, and then of the forests, pastures, waste grounds etc. (Marx, 1983: 120)

What is interesting to observe is that this mobile capital merely erodes – it does not determine its destruction.

Consequently, to conclude this section, it seems that the crucial determining factor of change within the agrarian commune does not reside within the dualisms identified, nor is it the emergence of exchange-value, as this merely ‘undermines’, ‘dissolves’, ‘erodes’ etc.; neither of them ‘causes’ the balance within the dualism to swing one way or the other. However, since the transition involves a property relationship, which in turn is about changing the usufruct of a spatial entity within the communal lands (Marx stated that it ‘leads first to the conversion of the arable into private property’), it must be determined by changes in the customary rights of land- holding through the social mechanism of the communal council or the intervention of an external power to enclose the communal lands (the state or a landlord), or both. However, before we turn to this, we need to explore the nature of ownership both communal and private within the context of the agrarian commune.

4. Marx on the Changing Forms of Property Relationships: Property Form as determined by its Mode of Production

Again, John Maguire provides some useful theoretical insights into Marx’s ideas on communal and private ownership within the draft letters. Maguire suggests that Marx and Engels were always interested in the concept of ownership – private property as the legal cornerstone of capitalism and communal property as the future basis of communism. According to Maguire, Marx throughout his career emphasized the inability of primitive communal ownership to handle the complexity of human development, but:

8

The theoretical import of communal property was to illustrate the merely historical necessity of private property, and to back up the abstract theoretical possibility of post-capitalist communism by showing that communal property had once already been the basis of social formations. In this vein, Marx frequently emphasizes the ‘artificial’ nature of private property … (Maguire 1978: 213)

What did Marx mean by the artificial nature of property relationship? Answering this question will hopefully bring us closer to explicating a methodology from Marx’s apparent eclectic work on the agrarian commune.

Marx and Engels in their various works engaged in a constant critique of the speculative philosophy of law and especially how it attempted to put forward idealist analyses of law based on the reification of legal concepts.16 The danger in the speculative philosopher’s approach to understanding law and the legal system was that of treating law as autonomous – a mere working out of its own logic or, as Marx put it, based ‘on a so-called general development of the mind’ without any recognition that the decisive factors shaping law were economic relations (Marx 1977: 20). Consequently, Marx reacted against this idealistic reification by continually demonstrating the dialectical relationship between the economic base of society and its ideological superstructure – including the legal system.17 For example, in Volume 3 of Capital, Marx gives his most explicit statement on the nature of private property in land and in doing so links up its legal form with the economic conditions prevailing at the time – capitalism:

Landed property is based on the monopoly by certain persons over definite portions of the globe, as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others. (Marx 1981: 614)

And:

With the legal power of these persons to use or misuse certain portions of the globe, nothing is decided. The use of this power depends wholly upon economic conditions, which are independent of their will. The legal view itself means that the landowner can do with the land what every owner of commodities can do with his commodities. And this view, this legal view of free private ownership of land, arises in the ancient world only with the dissolution of the organic order of society. (Marx 1981: 618)

Accordingly, following the logic of Marx’s argument, communal property and private property can only be adequately understood by putting them into the economic contexts (conditions of production) of societies, with differing economic contexts producing differing forms of property. Marx makes this point more explicit in the following passage, where he locates the specific forms of property relationships not only in differing types of agrarian communes but also in differing conditions of production:

Property – and this applies to its Asiatic, Slavonic, Ancient Classical and Germanic forms – therefore originally signifies a relation of the working (producing) subject (or a subject reproducing himself) to the conditions of his production or reproduction as his own. Hence, according to the conditions of production, property will take different forms. The object of production itself is to reproduce the producer in and together with these objective conditions of his existence. This behaviour as a proprietor – which is not the result but the precondition of labour, i.e. of production – assumes a specific existence of the individual as part of a tribal or communal entity (whose property he is himself up to a certain point) … (Marx 1964: 95)

9

Consequently, in order to uncover the essential structure of the agrarian commune wherever it is located along the evolutionary path, it is necessary to clarify not only the social relations of the commune (its property relationships) but also its production relations with the land. It is crucially a ‘double relationship’ in which the individual is a member of the community, and in which this social relationship mediates his relationship to the land (Sayer 1987). To deal with this type of complexity, Marx developed the framework of the mode of production. In this light, the numerous examples of agrarian communes mentioned by Marx in the drafts and beyond are differing concrete variants of the same mode of production – primitive communism.

5. Marx and Engels on the Irish Rundale

Included in this list of concrete variants was the rundale system. From what sources we have available to us,18 with regard to Marx’s and Engels’s research on the rundale, the first explicit mention of this agrarian commune comes from Engels’s Anti- Duhring (1878).19 Marx’s first published reference to the rundale is in part three of his Ethnological Notebooks (Krader 1974), where Marx is taking excerpts from Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions. In this reference to the rundale, Marx seems to be reinterpreting Maine’s description of the rundale by challenging his use of the legal term of severalty to explain the relationship of the communal members to their arable land. Marx, in Grundrisse, described this as a form of individual possession (Marx 1973: 492) rather than private property, which the legal term of severalty would suggest. And, crucially, this type of possession was mediated through the agrarian commune and communal property. The next reference to the rundale comes from Engels’s The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State (1884), which was based on Marx’s comment in the Ethnological Notebooks. As the reader can see, it displays a deep understanding of the rundale system:

Forty or fifty years ago village fields were very numerous and even today a few rundales, as they are called, may still be found. The peasants of a rundale, now individual tenants on the soil that had been the common property of the gens till seized by the English conquerors, pay rent for their respective piece of land, but put all their shares in arable and meadowland together, which they divide according to position and quality into gewanne, as they are called on the Moselle, each receiving a share in each gewann; moorland and pasture land are used in common. Only fifty years ago new divisions were still made from time to time, sometimes annually. The field-map of such a village looks exactly like that of a German Gehoershaft (peasant community) on the Moselle or in the Mittelwald. (Engels 1884: 194)

What Engels is suggesting here is that the feudalization of Irish land began with the Plantations, since which all occupiers of Irish land have had to pay a rent to a landlord, thereby becoming tenants. However, such tenancy is only one form of property relationship and it can co-exist with communal property, because the emergence of private property does not imply the demise of the commune, especially since peasants are still ‘putting all their shares in arable and meadowland together’– communally. This idea of a communal property relationship continuing to exist even after the attempted introduction of feudal land-tenure relationships during the Plantations of Ireland reiterates an earlier point made by Engels in his Anti-Duhring, that the rundale as a form of community ownership was able to continue to exist under ‘indirect feudal bondage’ (Engels 1878: 481).

The final reference appears in the revised edition of the Communist Manifesto of 1888, when, in a footnote, Engels changed the famous line ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ to ‘all written history’ (Engels 1888: 34). As the footnote discusses, the emergence of class was predicated

10

on the dissolution of primitive communities and the rise of private property. This empirical fact was, according to Engels, unknown in 1847 when the first edition of the Communist Manifesto was published, but:

Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. (Engels 1888: 34)

The theoretical pronouncements, then, that Engels and especially Marx made on the agrarian commune and its variant forms across time and space include the Irish rundale as a concrete manifestation of this particular mode of production of primitive communism.

6. The Rundale Forms of Communality and Individuality

As we have uncovered from Marx’s work on the agrarian commune, communality without individualism has only existed under the archaic form of this mode of production. All the other devolved forms – the Ancient, the Oriental, the Slavonic, the Germanic and the Russian – are penetrated to varying degrees by the element of individuality, to the extent that this integration of the two gives each type of agrarian commune its concrete particularity. Therefore, although communality and individualism are diametrically opposing each other as aspects of the social relations of the devolved agrarian communes, they were essential components of this communal production. What we need to investigate is how they specifically manifested themselves in the rundale form and subsequently impacted on the actual conditions of production – the land. These processes – the social (the property relationships), the economic (production relationships) and the ecological – form a unity within a mode of production which the following testifies:

Now this unity, which in one sense appears as the particular form of property, has its living reality in a specific mode of production itself, and this mode appears equally as the relationship of the individuals to one another and their specific daily behavior towards inorganic nature, their specific mode of labour (which is always family labour and often communal labour). (Marx 1964: 94)

And crucially, because of this essential unity, the reproduction of any one of these processes is simultaneously a reproduction of the other two:

To be a member of the community remains the precondition for the appropriation of land, but in his capacity as member of the community the individual is a private proprietor. His relation to his private property is both a relation to the land and to his existence as a member of the community, and his maintenance as a member is the maintenance of the community, and vice versa, etc. (Marx 1964: 73)

So the interpenetration of these ‘property’, production and ecological (natural) processes determines the essential structure of the primitive communist mode of production. Let us begin our analysis of the rundale agrarian commune with the property relationships, but not forgetting the problems associated with dealing with this level and its inherent tendency to reify property categories. The most identified and controversial category associated with the rundale is gavelkind, which Gibbs suggests is an entity that has evolved from the Brehon Laws:

11

What traces did Brehon Law, though abolished by the Judges and the Lord Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, leave in the habits and sentiments of the people, and can any of those traces be observed at the present day? Of the custom of Tanistry we hear no more; but the custom of gavelkind long survived, reappearing, under English law, in the form of tenancy common down to the early part of this century; and it may still be traced in the love of holding property in families, in the tendency to subdivide the land, and in an unfavorable shape, in Rundale, where the tenement is made up of a number of scattered patches of each particular quality of the land. (Gibbs 1870: 4–5)

According to De Laveleye, the English word gavelkind comes from the Irish Gabhail- cine, which denotes ‘accepted from the tribe’ (DeLaveleye 1878: 124–25). And this ‘tribal’ social relationship continued to exist under the rundale system in the nineteenth century:

There are, however, very extensive common lands, covered with grass and heath, which serve as pasture for the cattle. Portions of the communal domain are cultivated in turn, according to the practice still in force in many countries, and especially in the Belgian Ardennes; the occupancy is, however, only temporary, and the ownership still remains in the tribe. The system of periodic redistribution, with alternate occupancy, is still maintained under the form of rundale. A great part of the soil was subject to methods of tenure and agrarian customs, strongly impregnated with traditions of the old joint ownership. (De Laveleye 1878: 124–25)

This system of periodic redistribution of land, mentioned by De Laveleye, was described by Arthur Young as ‘change-dale’ (Young 1892: 215–16). Therefore, the concrete social practices of gavelkind and changedale – where ‘occupancy (of land) is only temporary’ in the rundale system – suggest that communal property and private possession co-existed together.20 Gavelkind meant that all members of the rundale commune had a right to access the land and none of them were able to alienate their share of it. And this communal property relationship allowed equality of access for all communal members.21

But gavelkind under the rundale system did not mean access to equal amounts of land but to equal accessibility to communal lands.22 According to Eric Almquist in his work on Co. Mayo, these rights of access were given to both men and women, and in certain instances may have been given to illegitimate children and orphans (Almquist 1977: 95). The most important implication of this devolved form of gavelkind within the rundale context is that this system accommodated the claims of new families and existing family members. All the commune’s members had a claim to both the arable and grazing shares of the communal land by birth (Almquist 1977: 93). And these shares were divided among the members with regard to soil fertility, as William Tighe observed:

The custom of these partners, when the ground is broken for tillage, is to divide it into shares or what they call ‘lochs’ and they are so desirous of making divisions equal in value, that each portion though small, does not always lie together but in scattered fragments according to the quality of the soil, so that a man having two acres of tillage may have two roods in coarse ground, two in deep, two in stony and two in wet, if these varieties happen to occur, when the division is made out … (Tighe 1802: 18)

Therefore, with regard to the procedures of landholding under the rundale communal conditions, the amount of arable land held by an individual member was never quantified by a determinate or definitive measurement system, such as acres, furlongs, roods etc, but was determined by the potential ecological output (or value) of the land area and the sharing out of its ecological output equally among the communal members. A similar method of share allocation was done for the pasture grounds of

12

the commune, where the share/unit was known as ‘a cow’s grass’ – the amount of pasturage needed to support a cow.23 Marx suggested that a similar tendency among the Russian communal members to engage in a process of spatial fragmentation was determined by the need to equalize the ‘chances of labour’ and thereby secure the same economic benefits for each of the communal members who possessed individualized usufruct rights.24 Therefore, within the rundale, ‘personal usufruct is thus combined with communal ownership’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 119). Theprocess of ‘changedale’ determined that any possession of communal lands by the individual members was to be of a temporary nature. Otway identified the existence of periodic redistribution among rundale communes in Co. Mayo in 1841:

… in the land appropriate to tillage, each head of the family casts lots every year for the number of ridges he is entitled to …. and moreover the ridges change ownership every third year, a new division taking place. The head of the village … makes the division, requiring each tenant to cast lots for his ridge, one in a good field, another in an inferior, and another in a worse. (Otway 1841: 35)

As a consequence of the existence of gavelkind and changedale within the rundale agrarian commune, there was no private property in the soil, and this determined that the individual member had only possession of continually changing pieces of the communal lands. The only space that may have been permanently occupied by an individual family was the clachan house and its adjoining walled garden and haggard. There is some evidence, though, to suggest that commune members exchanged their clachan cottages in a similar fashion to the changedale operating in the arable infield (Buchanan 1973: 592–93). Marx summarized this social relation to the soil (the conditions of production) thus: ‘What exists is only communal property and private possession’ (Marx 1964: 75).

Accordingly, the essential social form of production of the rundale system was the necessary reproduction of individuals as communal members, as Marx stated with regard to this particular mode of production:

The member of the community reproduces himself not through co-operation in wealth- producing labour, but in co-operation in labour for the (real or imaginary) communal interests aimed at sustaining the union against external and internal stress. (Marx 1964: 74)

In a real sense, then, this particular mode of production was essentially about producing people as its major ‘product’ of production, not just as ‘dot-like’ entities but as communal members of a particular agrarian commune, whose communality valorized itself in the need ‘for the continued existence of the community’ which required ‘maintenance of equality among its free self-sustaining peasants’ (Marx, 1964: 73). However, the valorization (Marx 1964: 72) of communal property requires maintenance not only of the material conditions of the commune in a production process, but also of the ‘possessory rights’ associated with the complex aspects of communal property. To reproduce the latter, it was necessary to have an institutional entity that stood above the everyday activities of the commune in order to maintain the customary codes of communal property relationships – the commune’s council.

7. The Communal Self-Government: The ‘King’, the Council of Elders, and the Supernatural

The customary mechanisms of communal accessibility as manifested through the concrete processes of gavelkind and changedale needed a governing apparatus of

13

some sort to oversee the continuation of these particular customs and others concerning the regulation of everyday life of the communal members. There is evidence to suggest that within each commune there was a council of elders, headed by a local ‘King’. Peter Knight, in his survey of Erris in the Irish Highlands in 1836, describes the function of such a King and his council:

There is a headman or King [Raight I had understood to be ‘King’, until Mr. Hardiman, the celebrated antiquarian and author of the History of Galway, told me that it meant ‘Kanfinne’, or ‘head’ of the local tribe, according to the Brehon administration]25 appointed in each village, who is deputed to cast the lots every third year, and to arrange with the community what work is to be done during the year in fencing, or probably reclaiming a new piece [though for obvious reasons, this is rare] or for setting the ‘bin’, as it is called, that is, the number of head of cattle of each kind, and for each man, that is to be put on the farm for the ensuing year, according to its stock of grass or pasture – the appointment of a herdsman, also for the whole village cattle, if each person does not take the office on himself by rotation – a thing not infrequent. The King takes care generally to have the rent collected, applots the proportion of taxes with the other elders of the village; for all is done in a patriarchal way, ‘coram populo’. He is generally the advisor and consultor of the villagers; their spokesman on certain occasions, and a general man of reference on any matters connected with the village. He finds his way to the Kingly station by imperceptible degrees, and by increasing mutual assent, as the old King dies off. (Knight 1836: 47–48)

The various functions that the local king performs in this account underline the importance of the fact that his ‘office’ and the council of elders comprised a form of self-government, which ‘is simply the particular part of the whole social system which deals with general questions’ (Maguire, 1978: 230–31). Maguire continues:

… Marx believes that in primitive communal society there is no in-built antagonism between individual and collective interest … it is a case of genuine self-government, where the members of the commune are not subject to a centre of authority outside them. (Maguire 1978: 229)

Dewar, in his observations of Tory Island, identifies this aspect of self-governance:

… the inhabitants are still unacquainted with any other law than the Brehon code. They choose their chief magistrate from among themselves and to his mandate, issued from his throne of turf, the people yield a cheerful and ready obedience. (Dewar 1812: 166)

There are a number of other references made to the existence of this kingly (and queenly) station in the West of Ireland. Ó Danachair (1981) makes extensive reference to a multitude of kin-based ‘king’ selection methods: in Claddagh, the king survives until the late 19th century (1981: 17); reference is made to a queen in Erris (1981: 20); the ordnance survey letters make reference to a king on Iniskea (1981: 23); and, on Inishmurray, reference is made to a ‘monarch’ (Robinson 1924, cited in Ó Danachair 1981). The king in all instances exhibits a definite set of characteristics attesting to his suitability:

As to the qualities desired in the king, we are not left in any doubt. Stature, strength, comeliness of person are mentioned, as are justice, wisdom and knowledge. Literary attainment is desirable; a good talker, a good storyteller, knowledge of two languages, the ability to read and write, all of these were laudable in the King. A degree of economic well- being or independence was also thought fitting. He had very positive and definite functions. The regulation, division and apportioning of fishing and shore rights and the allotment of tillage and pasture land was left to him, and in some cases, he appointed subsidiary officers such as herdsmen. He was expected to maintain traditional laws … in some instances we are

14

told that he specifically punished wrongdoers. He was expected to speak for his community in their relations with the outside authority. (Ó Danachair 1981: 25–26)

It is interesting to note the discrete personal characteristics needed to become the local king, which indicate the diverse roles such a functionary had to play. But what is crucial to emphasize is that the vast majority of the accounts of the communal king stated that it was not a hereditary position; he was chosen from among the communal members, as Lewis testifies in the following:

… the islanders had a resident king chosen by and from among themselves, and an ancient code of laws handed down by tradition, which it was his duty to administer; though the king had neither funds for the maintenance of his dignity, nor officers to enforce his authority, the people generally submitted voluntarily to these laws, and were always ready to carry out his judgements into execution. (Lewis 1837: 250)

The democratic procedure of the kingly election is important to point out, in that it highlighted that this was essentially a form of self-governance, where the decisions were not imposed upon the members from a central authority but from their own king and council. This becomes critical, in light of the fact that disputes were a constant feature in the rundale system of farming on account of the indeterminate nature of land holding26 as the following suggests:

The least trifle is a cause of disagreement. They were formerly perpetually quarrelling about their share of stock, and about what ground should be tilled, and who should occupy the different parts of it. The fences round the cornfields are made in the most temporary manner because the fields would be pastured in common after it was let out in tillage. (McCourt 1947: 233)

Constant disputing meant that they needed a mechanism that stood apart from their own personal needs and adjudicated in these communal disputes. Wakefield comments on this:

… and the elders of the village are the legislators, who established such regulations as may be judged proper for their community, and settle all disputes that arise among them. (Wakefield 1812: 260)

Therefore, the King and the council of elders oversee not only the continuation of customs but also establish regulations for the commune as a whole, and settle all disputes that may arise among the commune members (Sigerson 1871).

Finally, there is another aspect of this style of informal self-governance, which has a supernatural dimension to it. According to Ó Catháin and O’Flanagan in their study of place-names for the townland of Kilgalligan, Co Mayo, where an old clachan existed, there was a high density of ‘supernatural places that were only visible to the local eyes’. Especially important were the connections between the fairies and land boundaries. These boundaries were protected by the fairies, and the local people did not like to work the land too near the boundary in case they would anger the fairies (Ó Catháin and O’Flanagan, 1975: 267). Further:

Such tangible supernatural features … were palpable reminders of the existence of the otherworld, and they were both respected and feared. Their presence in Kilgalligan, as in other parts of Ireland, has frequently served as a determinant governing the arrangement of fields and crops, tracks and ditches, and even the location of dwelling houses and other buildings. (Ó Catháin and O’Flanagan 1975: 268)

15

Within the rundale landscape, then, there were certain spatial nodes, which were perceived not only as ‘spiritual’ but as also performing the role of protecting the boundaries of the commune, without the need for on-the-spot surveillance. This form of communal governance is essentially a moral code embedded in the landscape through the medium of oral culture (Slater 1993). The ‘fairies’ patrolled the individual plots and the communal lands while the commune’s members slept. But let us leave the world of the fairies and come down to the mundane – the spatial and temporal aspects of the agrarian commune of the rundale.

8. Simple Communal Production: The Spatial and TemporalConfigurations

In our discussion of the social relationships of this particular mode of production, we highlighted how the dualism of communality and individualism realized itself in the property forms of communal ownership and individual possession over spatial aspects of the commune’s lands. Therefore, it is necessary to outline the physical layout of the rundale communal lands and the activities which occur within these spatial entities.27 Buchanan provides a summary of the diverse aspects of the rundale spatial layout in the following:

Their land lay mainly within a single townland, a territorial unit whose mean size for the country is about 325 acres. If the townland was large, it was sometimes divided among several Rundale groups, each holding its land in lots separate from the others. The system varied greatly in detail, but had five main components: common arable or infield, an outfield used for pasture and periodic cultivation, common meadow, rough grazing which usually included peat-bog, and small enclosures near the farmhouse for gardens and haggards. Finally, the settlement was usually in the form of a loose cluster of dwellings and outbuildings. (Buchanan 1973: 586)

The latter cluster of dwellings or village has been described by the term clachan.28 The infield area of the communal land was the main location for the production of arable crops. According to Buchanan the physical appearance of the infield looked like the following:

The infield was normally held in rectangular strips, varying in length from 50 to 250 yards according to slope and soil conditions, and not more than 20 yards in width. Most were cultivated with the plough, and where the spade was used, the plots were demarcated by low, earthen banks, known by such terms as ‘mearings’, ‘ribs’, ‘roddens’, ‘teelogues’, or bones, and a higher earthen bank frequently bounded the infield. (Buchanan 1973: 586)

The ploughs used were either an ordinary lea-plough, or else a special paring-plough, and both these ploughs broke up the sod to be later shoveled into ridges or lazy-beds (Evans 1967: 144). The spade was the main instrument of production in the arable infield. The importance of the various types of markings in the infield becomes explicit when we realize that the infield was divided up into individual plots – sums or collops, which had a tendency to change hands under changedale. And the constant variability of land-holding under gavelkind and changedale had the effect of leaving much of the arable infield unenclosed or very badly fenced off from the openfield. During winter, the commune’s livestock roamed freely throughout the infield and outfield which also tended to damage the fencing between these two fields.29

The lack of permanent and solid fencing must be seen as an effect of the indeterminacy of landholding under the rundale system. This can be accounted for, firstly, by the need to constantly expand the infield to accommodate the increase in

16

the commune’s population and, secondly, by the prevailing custom of allowing the livestock to winter on the arable infield. The Ordnance Surveyors for Co. Donegal were especially observant of the lack of hedgerows and trees as a form of permanent fencing in rundale areas.30 The consequence of the lack of permanent fencing was that the commune’s livestock had to be strictly supervised, either by constant herding or by the tethering of animals. Evans describes this feature:

The old customs of tending [‘herding’] the cattle and tethering or spancelling them also derive from the Rundale phase with its lack of field-divisions and fences. ‘Cattle, sheep and goats’, wrote Arthur Young, ‘are all in bondage, their forelegs tied together with straw … cocks, hens, turkeys and geese all have their legs in thraldom.’ Various devices for limiting the freedom of farm animals are still widely used; even the hen with her chickens around her will be seen tethered by the leg to a stone or iron weight. (Evans 1967: 55)

The lack of hedgerows and subsequent herding or tethering of livestock is caused by the inability of the communal members to grow these types of permanent fences on account of the number of years it takes to grow into effective fencing, a time period never allowed by the indeterminacy of this type of communal land-holding. The outfield tended to complement the infield in the production of livestock – mainly cattle and sheep (Buchanan 1973: 586–87). The outfields, combined with mountain pastures, were the physical areas where livestock production was essentially carried out. The allocation of communal grazing land was calculated by the number of units of infield land allotted to each communal landholder. As with the plot held by the communal member in the arable infield, the amount of pasture land held was not devised by the acre, but by ‘a cow’s grass – a collop’, which again reflected the indeterminate nature of landholding within the rundale system. The outfield was therefore the source of fodder for the livestock and sometimes hay:

Where natural meadows existed along river or lake their use was carefully regulated to give each farmer a share of the infield. Sometimes the land was divided into plots scattered as in the infield, worked in severalty and grazed by herding the animals, each on its own plot. Occasionally the hay was mowed by communal labour and then divided in shares, with common grazing. But most of the grazing had to be found elsewhere in summer, and especially in mountain districts there are traditions of moving livestock long distances to seasonal pasture. (Buchanan 1973: 587)

During the summer period, there was a tendency for the animal stock to be moved from the vicinity of the clachan village to mountain pasture, depending on whether the commune had a right of pasturage on a particular mountain. In the old traditional custom of booleying, the animals were herded to these mountain pastures. This form of transhumance was done communally; again, like the openfield, each individual member was allowed to pasture so many heads of cattle and sheep. In this way, most rundale communes had certain grazing rights to mountain pastures and, at times, other rundale communes may have shared the same mountain pasture (Hill 1887: 18). The process of transhumance or booleying was mainly carried out by the young people of the commune, especially the young girls and women (Graham 1954: 76). The young people of the ‘booley’ not only herded cattle and sheep, they also churned milk into butter, spun the flax and knitted wool. The young men collected these products produced in the mountain booley and brought them back to the clachan on a weekly basis (Graham 1954: 14). At Halloween the livestock returned to the clachan from the summer booleying and between St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween the livestock were either herded in the outfield or on mountain pasture, in order to allow the communal

17

crops to be grown in the infield (Evans 1979: 50). Consequently, during the winter months the commune’s livestock was allowed to feed on the stubble of the crops harvested in the infield. Generally, no hay was grown for winter feeding and this lack of winter fodder was made up by allowing the livestock into the infield:

In the Upper portion of the Parish the spade is necessarily used … The tenantry in the high grounds grow no hay and feed their cattle in winter usually on oaten straw, which is shorn very close to the ground, and much grass is consequently in the butts of the sheaves. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Urney, Co. Donegal, 1836: 6)

The arrival and departure of the commune’s livestock to and from the infield during winter had important consequences for the cropping of the infield, as the infield was unsuited for the winter sowing of crops:

… in this parish from the first week in November until the latter end of April, the entire fair of the country resembles a great common, where cows, horses and sheep graze promiscuously, a man’s cabbage garden is not secure from the depredations of his neighbour’s cattle. It is nouncommon thing in winter to see a man drive his cows or sheep to a distance from his own farm, where he thinks the grass is better or the shelter warmer. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Pyemoaghy. Co. Donegal, 1836: 53)

Hence, not only was autumn sowing restricted by winter cattle-feeding practices, the types of crops grown were also extremely limited under the rundale system of crop rotation. From the evidence of the Ordnance Survey memoirs and reports it seems that white crops predominated. Potatoes began the rotation followed by barley (except in mountain areas where it was found to be unsuitable), then oats and flax and back to potatoes again (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Urney, Co. Donegal, 1836: 67). It is interesting to note that within this type of crop rotation there was no fallow or lea allowed. This led to the extraordinary situation that this arable infield was never rested nor rotated with any other spatial location within the agrarian commune. Within the rundale crop rotation system there appear to be two essential crops missing – wheat and green crops. Wheat is not sown because it is sown in autumn and harvested in spring and it therefore would interfere with the winter pasturing of livestock on the stubble of the infield. Green crops are also excluded not only because of the livestock occupation of the arable land in wintertime but also because green crops demand the use of plough technology which did not exist under the rundale system. Spade husbandry was the essential labour process of the rundale commune, as is indicated by the existence of ‘lazy-beds’ or ridges in the commune’s infield.

Finally, with regard to the spatial configuration of communal lands, there was the clachan – a ‘loose cluster of dwellings and outbuildings’. T.C. Foster gave the following description of a clachan:

There is no row of houses … but each cottage is stuck independently by itself, and always at an acute, obtuse or right angle to the next cottage as the case may be. The irregularity is curious; there are no two cottages placed in a line, or of the same size, dimensions or build. As this is the largest village I ever saw, so it is the poorest, the worst built and most irregular and most completely without head or centre, or market or church or school of any village I ever was in. It is an overgrown democracy. No man is better or richer than his neighbour. It is in fact, an Irish Rundale village. (Foster 1846, cited in Buchanan 1973: 594)

As previously stated, there is some evidence to suggest that the commune members interchanged their cottages in a similar fashion to the changedale system operating in

18

the arable infield. The clachan was also the physical location for a number of communal activities, as Evans indicates:

Apart from the co-operation implicit in the openfield system there was a good deal of sharing in other ways. Thus there would be a communal corn-kiln for drying the grain before grinding, a knocking stone for pounding barley, and in some districts a corbelled stone sweat-house which took the place of the village doctor in treating rheumatic pains. (Evans 1979: 32)

According to Gailey, the communal kilns were sometimes worked by individuals but mostly by the commune when a larger quantity of grain had to be dried (Gailey 1970: 52). The drying of large quantities of corn is attributed to the malting of corn preparatory to the illicit distillation of poitín (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Inniskeel, Co. Donegal, 1836: 25).

What we have discovered in our survey of the spatial configuration of the rundale’s lands and the diverse productive activities within them is that they were essentially determined by the indeterminacy of individual possession of land. And the central hub of the amount of land possessed is determined by the individual’s access to the infield, which in turn determines the amount of livestock allowed on the commune’s pasture land. This indeterminacy of land-holding manifests itself in the concept of collop or sum, which as we have discovered was originally the amount of land necessary to feed a cow – ‘cow’s grass’. Knight suggests the origin of this type of rundale measurement and its extension into the arable infield:

The holdings are by sums or collops, which originally meant the number of heads of cattle the farm could rear by pasture, but, as some tillage became afterwards necessary, they divided the crop-ground into collops as well as the pasture, and each farm then had its number of tillage collops and grazing collops. The tillage collop is supposed to be capable of supporting one family by its produce. (Knight 1836: 46–47)

The concept of the collop is not really a measurement of land area such as the acre, but it is a measurement of the physical output of land, taking in the quality of the land necessary to keep a family or a cow. Consequently, its spatial dimensions may vary from location to location depending on the quality of the land. But probably its most crucial characteristic is its ability to be flexible, not only with regard to soil qualities but also with regard to ensuring an equal standard of living among the rundale members. For example, the incorporation of the potato within the commune’s croprotations would allow the tillage collop to reduce in size, because the potato would produce more yields per unit area than any other crop. The arrangement of both grazing and tillage collops with regard to their redistribution in changedale and the amount of collops held by each individual commune member, therefore, needed a communal organization. This complex set of procedures was provided by the commune’s council of elders, headed by the commune’s ‘king’.

Therefore, the commune’s council had to arrange not only the productive behaviour of its direct producers but also the technical exploitation of the physical means of production. This involved two processes. The first process concerned the actual physical location of the commune’s means of production (i.e. the areas designated for tillage and for pasture) and the distribution of those means of production on an equal basis between the communal direct producers. The second process involved organizing the respective working periods of the individual producer in a coordinated way so that no one individual member could upset the working periods of the other communal members (e.g. vacating the infield after the last day of October). All these complex arrangements had to be based on customary rules and

19

laws, where the actual production process of the commune as a whole had to be communally organized to the last detail. Therefore, the inherent tendency of the rundale commune was to reproduce its members as equal members of the commune. It was not primarily concerned with the production of wealth but with the physical reproduction of its members as members of the commune (i.e. use-value production in essence). In order to achieve this aim, it was necessary to attempt to continually maintain and preserve the established equilibrium of shared physical resources between the communal members. But, if the essential social form of communal production is the reproduction of communal members, any increase in their numbers will demand a reallocation of these communal resources, which will in turn undermine the initial equilibrium. Marx stated this in the following way:

If the community as such is to continue in the old way, the reproduction of its members under the objective conditions already assumed as given, is necessary. Production itself, the advance of population (which also falls under the head(ing) of production), in time necessarily eliminates these conditions, destroying instead of reproducing them, etc., and as this occurs the community decays and dies, together with the property relations on which it was based. (Marx 1964: 82–83)

The dynamic of this particular mode of production is population growth, which is ironic. This situation comes about because the essential social form is the reproduction of communal members, yet an increase in the number of members,which is a ‘natural’ consequence of family reproduction practices – especially where agricultural work is done with family labour – causes a realignment of communal resources. Marx highlighted this tendency with regard to the Ancient variant of this mode of production:

For instance, where each individual is supposed to possess so many acres of land, the mere increase in population constitutes an obstacle. If this is to be overcome, colonization will develop … Thus the preservation of the ancient community implies the destruction of the conditions upon which it rests, and turns into its opposite. (Marx 1964: 92–93)

Therefore, in order to accommodate new family members, the rundale agrarian commune had to engage in an expanded form of communal production.

9. Expanded Communal Production

The overall reproduction process of the rundale system concerns not only the physical reproduction of the direct producer, his immediate dependents and the social relations of communality and individualism that ‘rest’ upon those physical conditions of production, but also the financial reproduction of the commune and its members. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all members of Irish society were tied into a monied economy, whether they were from the city of Dublin or Tory Island. The rundale communities of the West were no exception to this trend.31

All of these processes of reproduction, although distinct in their respective determinations within their own processual forms are inherently connected to each other because they mediate each other. A contraction or collapse of one will have a major impact on the other processes of reproduction.

a). Increasing Parcellization of Land and the Subsequent Fragmentation of the Labour Process

The major constraint of the rundale system on its physical reproduction process was the inherent tendency of the system to subdivide the means of production in order to

20

accommodate its growing population. An example of such subdivision is the Gweedore estate, Co. Donegal:

By 1851, subdivision had almost reached its physical limits and the arable area per holding had become very small. The average arable per holding had fallen to 2.3 acres, while the average per person was .43 acres. (Douglas 1963: 11)

And this subdivision of the arable land, coupled with the arable land increasingly ‘colonizing’ the pasture lands of the commune, caused a devastating decline in the physical subsistence of the communal members:

To make matters worse, in the early decades of the nineteenth century … the numbers of livestock had to be reduced, with a resultant decline in protein-giving milk and butter in the local diet. Thus in the eighteenth century the diet had included ‘milk, curds, butter, fish, rabbits, potatoes and bread’, in 1802 ‘potatoes, benefits of seashore and a little oaten bread, milk and butter’, but by 1840 ‘potatoes, and peppered water with occasional sprats and salt’ were said to be the main foods. (Douglas 1963: 11–12)

We have already discovered from Marx’s analysis of primitive communism that the essential consequence of attempting to maintain the equality of communal membership was to allow members’ children access to the communal land, but this custom imposed an internal stress in that it was necessary to continually subdivide the commune’s means of production in order to accommodate its growing population of direct producers. Buchanan identifies this trend in the rundale system, specifically in the growth of the clachans:

In Western districts meantime, clachans not only survived but actually grew in number and size. For example, four to eight dwellings were an average size in the early eighteenth century, but by the first decade of the nineteenth century, clachans in Co. Donegal averaged thirty dwellings, rising as high as 120 to 200 in Co. Clare. The chief reason for this increase was rising population, which in the rundale system was accommodated by subdivision of holdings in the customary practice of gavelkind inheritance. Towards the end of the century, pressure of population was so great that even farms formerly held in severalty might become rundale holdings, in this way, the new generation of joint-tenants building their houses alongside the original dwellings to become clachans. (Buchanan 1970: 153)

But the degree of immiseration depended upon the development of communal subdivision, which varied from rundale commune to commune, and was determined by population increase. The rundale system did not posit a surplus population outside the social conditions of reproduction, but attempted to accommodate all its increasing communal membership within its own communal system. As a consequence, not only was there a tendency to encourage population growth, there was also little tendency towards emigration:

The survival of the infield-outfield system of farming in parts of South-east [Derry] until late in the nineteenth century may have been an important factor in limiting emigration from that area, due to the way of life it represented, as well as through its economic effects. The subdivision of land held in common, associated with this form of agriculture, meant that some increase of population could be absorbed, even though there might be a fall in the standard of living of the whole community; in those districts where subdivision had halted, however, the problem of obtaining land for the members of an increasing population could only be solved by emigration. (Johnson 1959: 155)

21

So, where there was no barrier of access to land, not only were communal members encouraged to stay, they could also get married without waiting to inherit the leasehold, as occurred where the landlord class determined accessibility to land. In consequence the rundale members tended to marry early. There is some evidence to suggest that they married frequently at the age of sixteen and, in one instance, the combined ages of one couple did not exceed twenty-eight (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1834, Parish of Desertagney Co. Donegal: 11).

Therefore, early marriages, determined by communal access to land, led to massive population increase in rundale areas. But this type of social and sexual reproduction process has inherent dangers as indicated by the increasing immiseration of the rundale’s physical means of subsistence. The lowering of the physical standard of the means of subsistence narrows the ability of the commune to continually reproduce itself. Concretely, this involved the commune subsisting more and more on the potato as its staple crop for subsistence. And any contraction in potato crop yields can force the communal members into a situation where they have no choice but to emigrate. Emigration in this context is the emigration of entire families as they flee starvation, which has come about because of collapse of the physical means of reproduction to maintain itself.

As we have already stated, the arable infield of the rundale system was the hub of the whole system. The infield of the commune was organized through the system of spade husbandry with its inherent structure of ‘lazy beds’ or ridges. And in the system of changedale, not only were the ridges rotated every one or two years, they were also given to new members of the commune. The consequence of the latter tendency was that the arable infield tended to be increasingly ‘parcellized’ into smaller individually- held plots and that it physically began to expand upon the outfield and the pasture lands of the commune. This, coupled with the physical digging of the lazy beds, meant that the arable area expanded every year, as the following passage from the Devon Commission suggests:

A change takes place in occupation every two years, owing to their mode of tillage, which is very singular. They grow their crops in very wide ridges, which are formed into inclined planes: one side of the ridge being two or three feet higher than the other. The seed is spread upon the ridge and it is covered from a furrow always dug from the high side, so that every year the mould of the field is moved by the breadth of the furrow, or about eighteen inches, from one side of the field to the other. Hence the necessity of a change every two years. (McCourt 1947: 56)

Of course this inherent expansion of the arable infield does not necessarily suggest that the actual location of the infield changed. The opposite is true. The arable infield never rotated with the outfield, but was constantly cropped as is indicated in the following account from the landowner J.N. Thompson’s diary, Carndonagh, Co. Donegal:

The system of rundale is still rife and prevails over most of this estate. The ditches are for the most part mere dividing lines over which cattle and sheep can freely pass, even on the best farms well fenced fields are a modern improvement … People too are beginning to understand something of rotations of crops; formerly after potatoes, barley or oats was grown till the land would no longer give corn, then perhaps a wretched crop of flax, then potatoes again. Upland grass was not thought of, and pasture land was quite apart from arable. Some land was always ploughed, other land never, but always kept in pasture. Some of the land I now have I do not think had been rested within living memory. (Thompson, n.d., circa 1801–1833: 237)

22

These emerging trends of more intensive cultivation of the arable land (through the process of plot subdivision) and the necessary expansion of the arable out on to the pasture lands of the commune were a direct consequence of the rundale system’s need to engage in expanded reproduction. This inherent and essential tendency of communal production had a major impact on the labour processes of this particular mode of production in the concrete context of the rundale commune. Because of the necessary requirement to accommodate new family members and allow them access to the arable infield, this spatial area becomes increasingly ‘parcellized’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 113) – breaking down into smaller and smaller plots of tillage cultivation. Probably one of the most extreme example of such a process of parcellization, reported by Bell, was the case from Donegal for the 1840s in which ‘one man had his land in 42 different places and gave up in despair, declaring that it would take a very keen man to find it’ (Bell 2008: 55). Marx has suggested that the land is the essential ‘condition of labour’ (Marx 1964: 74); with the increasing partitioning of the commune’s infield, the labour process itself becomes more fragmented with the declining size of the individual plots of cultivation. Fragmentation of the labour process under these dispersed spatial conditions ‘compels a dispersion of strength and time’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 122) of the labour power of the individual communal member and his immediate family. And, although these arable ‘tillers’ were to be seen working in the infield and apparently side-by-side with each other, they were actually working not with each other but were engaged in ‘uncoordinated individual activities on scattered means of production, where each follows the logic of his particular situation and nobody has an overall plan of the totality’ (Maguire 1978: 224).

Labouring under these fragmented conditions, the individual commune members appropriated the fruits of their own labour not only from the arable infield but also from the pasturing of livestock on the communal grazing grounds. This surplus product was then sold as a commodity in a market, and thereby the commune entered into simple commodity production.

b). Simple Commodity Production under the Communal Conditions of the Rundale

Marx, in his discussion of the Russian variant of the agrarian commune, suggested that fragmented labour was the key factor in the private appropriation of surplus product and its realization into exchange value. In the case of the rundale commune, the accumulation of money by the individual communal members was necessary for them to reproduce themselves as members of a society beyond the immediate confines of their particular commune. Money was needed to pay the landlord, the priest, the taxman, the merchant trader and the usurer.32

Consequently, the mediation of money within the social relations of production in the rundale commune determined that a certain proportion of the commune’s surplus product had to be produced for exchange value. And although the essential ‘precondition for the continued existence of the community’ was the ‘maintenance of equality among its free-sustaining peasants’, the commune had now become dependent on the accumulation of money to meet these expenses. Whether these necessary expenses were paid by the commune as a whole or by individuals depended upon the degree of individualism developed within each rundale commune.

Besides producing agricultural products as marketable commodities, strategies were developed by the communal members which involved essentially adding more exchange value to the actual agricultural products, by changing ‘primary’ products into more ‘finished’ commodities. These subsidiary activities included brick-making,

23

fishing, kelping, knitting, flax spinning, the weaving of linen cloth, and the illicit distillation of alcohol. In the Parish of Inniskeel, Co. Donegal for example, poitín was produced:

Barley and oats are the only descriptions of grain grown in the parish, from the universal practice of illicit distillation. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1836, Parish of Inniskeel Co. Donegal: 25)

The production of poitín was aided by the communality of the rundale system, and the subsequent difficulties that the Revenue officers had in identifying the individuals involved in producing this illicit alcohol was due to the communality of landholding under the rundale system (Bonner 1969: 82–83). But these subsidiary ‘industries’ toagricultural production must be seen as an attempt to counteract not only the diminishing material returns from the rundale’s immediate agricultural production process but also the diminishing financial returns from the traditional agricultural commodities of the rundale system. But, as can be seen from the apparent diversification of these subsidiary products, their production was extremely nonspecialized and consequently undercapitalized with regard to their production techniques. Therefore, the development of this type of commodity production never got beyond the stage of a putting-out system (linen and wool), in which merchant capital dominated rather than industrial capital as under the capitalist mode of production. However, whether a particular rundale community produced these subsidiary commodities depended on its specific historical conditions and locality as the following indicates for the Parish of Inniskeel, Co. Donegal.33

In the districts neighbouring the seashore the females are universally employed in [the] spinning [of] linen yarn – in the mountainous parts of my parish they knit woollen stockings, and on average the knitters earn 5d per day. The neighbouring district of [the] Rosses is celebrated for its knitting of woollen stockings. (Bonner 1969: 69)

In Mayo, for instance, spinning yarn was later substituted by seasonal migration and egg production from rundale areas (Almquist 1977: 253–254). But these subsidiary ‘industries’ and their specific development have more to do with the reproduction of the rundale system as a whole rather than as a determining structure in this particular mode of production. The reason for this is that these industrial activities were never engaged in under communal conditions of production, and the determining structure continued to be the need to reproduce the individual as a communal member. It should be stressed, however, that the development of exchange-value production meant that more of the rundale system became dependent on market relationships, which had the tendency to encourage the accumulation of money capital by individuals rather than by the commune as a whole.

In the previous section, we observed how population increase imposed severe constraints on the rundale’s production process, as it led to increasing fragmentation of the labour processes on the scattered plots. But this tendency had to cope also with the necessary commercialization of production, incorporating both agricultural and ‘domestic’ industries. The combination of these two tendencies called for expanded production. But what was crucial for expanded production was for the commune to attempt to maintain the market/subsistence balance. For example, for Clare Island, Co. Mayo, Whelan argues that, as the potato became the subsistence crop of the villagers, the oat crop was ‘increasingly assigned to the market’ (Whelan 1999: 81). This demarcation became so pronounced that the local island population eliminated oats

24

from their diet to the extent that they became overdependent on the potato as their only source of subsistence.

The twin stresses of accommodating the rundale’s increasing population and of the need to engage in commodity production put extreme pressure on the capacity of the existing means of production to produce sufficient products to meet these competing needs. In fact, these production demands for physical subsistence and commodity production were limiting the development of each other. With increasing population, more of the communal land would have to be given over to providing more of the physical means of subsistence. This eventually would limit the area of land for commodity production. But it is interesting to note that it could not happen the other way around, in that, if the area under commodity production grew to the detriment of the commune being able to provide sufficient subsistence for itsmembers, existing and new, the whole raison d’etre for this form of communal production would collapse i.e. the continuing maintenance of equality, if (and unfortunately when) the subsistence crop failed.

a) The Consequences of Restricted Land for Spatial Expansion on the Expanded Communal Reproduction Process

Marx, in his discussion of the reproduction of the agrarian commune, made it clear that an increase in population in the context of maintaining equal possession of land among its members can become an obstacle to that process of reproduction. Equality for the new members cannot be achieved under the existing spatial conditions. ‘If this (obstacle) is to be overcome, colonization will develop …’ (Marx 1964: 92). Here, the agrarian commune in question will need to expand spatially in order to provide the land required to maintain that share equality. With regard to the rundale, this necessary process of spatial colonization ideally meant establishing a new commune on unoccupied lands, with its own infield/outfield and clachan locations, which would halt the process of land parcellization. But in the Irish context, especially from the Plantations onwards, this seemingly necessary process of colonization was limited by the impositions of landlordism and their associated form of land tenure. As a consequence, the rundale communes were themselves colonized and many may have been pushed out of the fertile lands and onto the bogs and mountains by the landlords in search of increased rents.34 Whelan gives an example of this type of external colonization of the rundale communes for the West of Ireland in the early part of the eighteenth century, as cattle grazers, through the power of the landlords, got their hands on the fertile rundale lands, by evicting the members. He quotes an account by Charles O’Hara of this instance of rundale farmers’ removal from the limestone lowlands:

By 1720, the demand for store cattle from the south had reached us (in Connacht) and the breeding business grew more profitable. Many villagers were turned off and the lands which they had occupied were stocked with cattle. Some of these village tenants took mountain farms but many more went away. About 1726, the graziers, encouraged by the markets, first raised the price of land in order to cant all the cottagers out of their farms. (Whelan 1999: 78)

The implications of this expropriation of the rundale communes from the low-lying fertile lands may have been quite profound and impacted on them in various ways. Firstly, it limited their own ability to colonize, as the landlords grabbed a large proportion of the West of Ireland land for the grazing entrepreneurs. Secondly, being left with only bog and mountain to exist upon, the rundale communal members had no choice but to physically colonize these marginal lands. Thirdly, since they were being

25

colonized, their essential need to colonize in order to maintain equality could only be met internally – within their own communal lands which they themselves controlled. And since the original arable infield is the essential hub of the established commune, and therefore could not be interfered with without undermining the social and material basis of the communal production, the only alternative left was for the agrarian community members to colonize their own ‘waste land’, in which they had traditionally ‘booleyed’ their livestock. Clachans, as the most visible indicator of the rundale system therefore, began to ‘spring up’ not only in old booley mountain locations but also on so-called compact farms where the original legal tenants were able to undermine the landlord’s resistance to land subdivision by allowing a rundale commune to establish itself upon these previously enclosed tenant farms.35

In certain instances, the landlord attempted to maintain some sort of formal control over this clandestine development by issuing partnership leases to some of the rundale communal members. But, in reality, the landlords in this situation had lost control of access to their estates, and thereby the determination of accessibility had moved from the landlords to the agrarian communes. But this countertendency of the landlord class to maintain its colonial control over ‘legally’ held estates was very much determined by the power relationships between the landlords and the communes – between formal legal state processes and the customary landholding system of the rundale communities. And, crucially, this resistance to the full operation of landlordism on the part of the rundale commune was very much predicated on their respective overall processes of reproduction. A collapse or even a significant contraction in any one of these mediated processes of reproduction would not only weaken the commune but could spell disaster for the commune as the landlords, seeing a weakness in their ability to resist, pounced on them with the full power of the state legal and military apparatus. Consequently, the sustainability of the rundale system was not dependent upon one essential structure but was determined by a diverse unity of its reproduction processes. Not only had the commune members to survive the vicissitudes of the market and the ever-present opportunism of the landlord class to enclose their communal lands, they also needed to sustain the fertility of their lands, which they physically subsisted upon. The land and its inherent ecological systems on which the rundale communes physically maintained themselves on had to be constantly reproduced.

10. The Socio-ecological Metabolism of the Rundale and its emerging Metabolic Rift

Marx has provided us not only with the complex theoretical tool of the mode of production which has allowed us to begin an exploration of the dynamics of the rundale communal system of production, but he also developed a conceptual framework which can help us to understand the role that the ecological system played in the reproduction of this particular agrarian system.36 According to John Bellamy Foster, the theoretical cornerstones of Marx’s materialist understanding of society’s ecological base were his concepts of the socio-ecological metabolism and the metabolic rift (Foster 1999). These ‘ecological’ concepts operated at a particular level within the overall workings of a mode of production. As part of this essential aspect of a mode of production, society directly engages with the forces of nature, in which there is a necessary exchange (or flow) of materials from nature to ourselves, and from ourselves back to nature. Marx used the concept of metabolism to capture this reciprocal exchange of materials between living entities such as ourselves and the natural environment. Crucially, this process of metabolism includes both the natural

26

and social forms of exchange and this exchange takes place at the level of the labour process within a particular mode of production. Marx states this in the following with regard to how man engages with nature through this process of socio-ecological metabolism:

Labour process … regulates and controls the metabolism between himself [man] 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 adapted to his needs. (Marx 1976: 283)

Therefore, the complex relationships expressed in the concept of socio-ecological metabolism are present in all modes of production, but take on a specific form depending on how they are embedded into a particular mode of production.

Marx, inspired by the work of the German agricultural chemist Von Liebig, developed the concept of metabolic rift to explain the situation when the socio- ecological metabolism becomes disrupted and the nutrients from the soil are not adequately replenished during the agricultural production process. The consequence of this ecological trend is that soil exhaustion emerges as the nutrients continue to be extracted from the soil. The decline in the natural fertility of the soil was due to the disruption of the soil nutrient cycle. As crops and animal products were being produced in agricultural fields, nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium were being removed from these fields and shipped to locations far removed from their points of origin, especially to urban centres. As a consequence, the constituent elements of the soil that made up the products/commodities were also removed and not replaced naturally. The transportation of these nutrients in the form of agricultural commodities had two important consequences. Firstly, they created a rift in the natural soil cycle, which had to be replaced by human intervention or the conditions of reproduction in the soil structure would be permanently undermined. Secondly, the excretion of these nutrients in the urban environment tended to cause pollution in the local waterways (The River Thames in London in the nineteenth century, for example).

As we have discovered in our analysis of the expanded form of communal production, the rundale commune was engaging in commodity production, which saw agricultural products, such as various types of livestock and crops, thrown onto the market. These rundale agricultural commodities with their embedded nutrients were similarly searching for exchange value as capitalist commodities and subsequently entered into the diverse circuits of commodity exchange in this global market context. And, like capitalist agricultural products, their nutrients were forever lost to the local rundale eco-system that helped produce them. In this context, it is likely that the local ecosystems of the rundale communes suffered a similar disruption of their nutrient cycle – a metabolic rift.

a) Balancing Livestock with Crops as a way of maintaining an uninterrupted Flow of Nutrients: a ‘leaky’ Ecological Solution to the Metabolic Rift within Simple Communal Production

O’Sullivan and Downey provide a good summary of what was seemingly required to maintain the ecological sustainability of the rundale system of farming:

The sustainability of rundale farming required the effective integration of the crop and tillage dimensions of the system. In particular, a dynamic ecological equilibrium had to be

27

maintained between livestock-carrying capacity … and the optimization of crop production. (O’Sullivan and Downey 2008: 23)

And, as we have discovered in our discussion of the simple form of communal production, the arable infield was permanently cultivated and never rested to allow it to restore at least some of its fertility naturally. This endemic metabolic rift was determined not solely by over-cropping but also by use of a poor crop rotation system, which did not allow any possibility of the soil restoring fertility by the application of nutrient replacing crops such as red clover or peas, etc. The exclusion of ‘green crops’ from the rundale crop rotation system meant that white crop rotationdominated the arable infield, which in itself can lead to soil exhaustion. Continuous white crop rotation without fallowing meant that the arable infield could not avoid the emergence of the metabolic rift and its physical manifestation in soil exhaustion. The following Ordnance Survey report from Donegal, where rundale was prevalent, testifies to the determining effects of metabolic rift on local agriculture:

Rotation of crops is badly attended upon here. After they raise their crops of barley, they sow corn after corn, until their land is exhausted before they begin to potato it. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835, Parish of Donagh)

So, in this context, the only means through which the soil could be replenished of its ‘lost’ nutrients were if the rundale members, either collectively or individually, came up with a strategy which ‘sourced’ the required nutrients from the non-arable lands of the commune. And, since no artificial fertilizer existed at this time, any attempt at maintaining the fertility of the infield ‘was fundamentally dependent upon the availability of animal manure, its single most important nutrient component’ (Whelan 1997). Therefore, livestock, especially cattle, performed contradictory roles with regard to the metabolic rift in the rundale system of farming. As potential commodities, the nutrients that they absorbed into their own metabolic system, which became physically part of that system, were to be permanently lost when they were moved off the communal land and sold to cattle buyers. Thus, they were part of the rundales’ metabolic rift – a rift in the nutrient cycle of the communal pasture lands. However, while roaming and grazing on the communal pasture lands and even on the winter stubble of the arable infield, they were ‘harvesting’ the soil’s nutrients, which had been metabolized in the natural grasses and flora of the meadow ecosystem. In processing these nutrients through their digestive system, they were not just ‘deconstructing’ the concrete plant forms of the nutrients but simultaneouslyconcentrating these released nutrients into a more socially useable form of animal manure. In this last stage of the animal phase of the socio-ecological metabolism, the nutrients pass through the body of the beast to finally emerge in a concrete form that can be used by society. Within the animal phase of the metamorphosis, the nutrients get transformed into a transportable form, and in this form they move from their original soil location. When the excrement leaves the body of the animal, it provides the material conditions for the ‘socio’ to be reunited with the ‘ecological’ in this constant metabolic movement of nutrients. But in this stage, society becomes the necessary conduit, as the excrement is gathered up to be later put back into the soil. In the case of the rundale, this transfer of nutrients occurs between the communal pastures of the outfield and commonage (including the infield stubble during the winter months) to the individual arable plots of the infield. But, in order to facilitate the accumulation of animal manure, the livestock of the commune were penned in various kinds of spatial locations for short periods of time. The most dramatic

28

example of this was the keeping of livestock, especially milking cows, during the winter nights within the houses of the clachan. At one end of the house, the livestock were penned in by a low partition wall, where they had a littering of straw (Collins 2008: 302). The dung was brought out of the house and piled into individual dung- heaps near the door of the clachan house. Evans has even suggested that the lay-out and location of the clachan on the side of a hill was planned in order to facilitate the movement of the manure downhill and into the infield.37 Another location for the accumulation of useable excrement was when the livestock were moved to their summer booleying grounds on the common mountains. In the evenings, the cows were brought down to a rectangular enclosure beside the booley huts for milking and were kept in over-night (Bell 2008: 53). Again this facilitated the construction of a dung ‘hill’. The removal of the manure from the stockpiling locations was ‘almost entirely the work of the female members of the families’ and it was ‘conveyed in baskets on women’s backs’ (Robertson 2007: 244). With increasing parcellization ofthe land into smaller individual plots and the subsequent scattering of these plots throughout the infield (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 122), the work of transporting the dung became more physically demanding as it had to be brought to more and more locations within the infield. The method of removal of the manure by the women population of the individual families further highlights the extent to which individualization was constantly eroding the old communal aspects of the rundale.

Within the infield, the manure was brought to the lazy beds which were being prepared for the potato crop. This was so because the potato crop was the only crop manured in the white crop rotation. The manure was then selectively placed on the potato lazy beds as the following testifies:

He does not spread the manure under the seed, but ribs or prabbrias them. Ribbing is done two ways. The first method was to make a hole in the ground with a stick made for the purpose and drop the seed in it. But a better way is found out – the man digs five shallow marks with a spade in which the dropper deposits the seed, he then digs five more and throws the clay off the spade on the seed already dropped, and so till the Dale is finished. When the fibres of the seed shoot forth [which could not extent so well otherwise] the manure is spread as thin as possible, set sightly dressed, dressed neatly, and by the shovelling heavily a good crop is expected. Some neither set nor rib but prabbin their potatoes. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835, Parish of Donegal, Co. Donegal: 5)

The implication of this selective application of the manure to the lazy beds in the arable infield suggests that the manuring process was inadequate to overcome the loss of nutrients from the tilled soil and thereby unable to repair the damage done to the nutrient recycling process by the metabolic rift. More nutrients apparently leaked from the ecological system than were replaced by the rundale members and this was manifested in the continuing decline in the fertility of the soil. One possible solution to the metabolic rift was to find more nutrients from other sources than the communal livestock – other non-animal fertilizers. But it must be pointed out at this stage in the analysis that, with the continuing presence of the metabolic rift (even after animal manure was used to counteract its effect), the amount of crop production had to keep pace with the population structure of the commune and its necessary financial requirements. The consequence of this is that the arable infield had to logically expand outwards in order to take in new spatial areas which were not as depleted of the soil nutrients as the original infield. The problem was, however, that the new arable plots were on old communal pasturing grounds.

29

b) Enclosing the Outfield as the Final Attempt to thwart the Metabolic Rift under the Expanded Communal Production

The direct producers attempted to counteract the natural tendency of white crop production to exhaust the land by using a diverse range of natural fertilizers with the potato crop, such as marl, lime, burnt sod, peat, mud, sea-sand and shells and bones (Collins, 2008: xv). Of course, cattle manure is constantly used when available and, near the seashore, seaweed was the commonly used form of manure.38 However, the ability of manure to recuperate the soil’s condition from the effects of the metabolic rift depended not just on an adequate availability but also on the quality of thenutrients ‘gathered’, and the ‘harvesting’ of the nutrients was determined by the amount of livestock that the commune had. But, with the growth in the commune’s population and the subsequent need to expand arable production for subsistence, the demand for manure increased accordingly. But the supply of dung manure was itself limited by the expansion of the area given over to arable production, since the arable area had to encroach on pasture land; the amount of stock, particularly cattle, had to be restricted accordingly. Therefore, as the demand for manure increased with the expansion of arable, its supply was reduced proportionately. McCourt identifies this problem and the measures taken to overcome it:

… less grazing also meant fewer stock could be kept, thereby reducing the quantity of manure at a time when an increase was necessary to sustain corn yields on the infield where diminishing shares, because of increased population, were expected to produce an expanding cash crop. Two short-term measures helped to postpone the crisis. Enclosed pasture was provided on the outfield; and the intensive application of shell-sand, seaweed and, in some areas like Lecale, marl, allowed continuous cropping of the infield to continue, albeit not indefinitely’. (McCourt 1981:125)

The important general conclusion to be reached from our examination of these tendencies was that the manuring process of the rundale system was totally inadequate in preventing the ever-diminishing crop returns due to soil exhaustion. In fact, the failure of the manuring process to revitalize the soil caused even further expansion of the arable cultivation over the pasture, as the commune tried to make up declining yields through further colonization of the commune’s own pasture lands, even encroaching on the communal bog and mountain commonage. These newly-reclaimed arable areas produced higher crop yields:

There were three large tracks of reclaimed bog, quite flat without any fences which produce superior crops. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1834 Parish of Clonmany Co. Donegal: 25)

Initially these arable plots were allocated according to the amount of collops or sums held in the original infield, but later these plots were given over to individuals on a permanent basis (Buchanan 1973: 595) and probably enclosed on a permanent basis. Consequently, reclamation of land for arable production for expanded reproduction meant that the commune had only two possibilities, as Buchanan stated:

But reclamation of land for cropping led to curtailment of grazing, and a reduction in the number of livestock meant less manure for the infield when animals grazed the stubble. Livestock numbers could be maintained if alternative winter fodder was available and root crops were an obvious solution, used in combination with a green fallow, which in turn would help maintain the fertility of the infield. If this was adopted, however, livestock would have to be denied access to the infield in winter. There were two possibilities: to provide enclosed pasture for the livestock or to enclose the infield strips. The former was often achieved by enclosing the individually owned plots on the outfield, or on the edge of the common grazing;

30

but the latter required common agreement since it denied rights of common grazing. This was impossible to achieve where changedale was practised, and it became increasingly difficult as subdivision progressed. (Buchanan 1973: 595–596)

It is interesting to note that there was greater flexibility in the outfield to allow for the development of individualized landholding than in the arable infield. These newly- enclosed fields were thereby capable of overcoming the declining productiveness of the arable production under the rundale system. But this measure came at a price, in the sense that these new cuts allowed for a greater individualization of communal production. Therefore, this practical solution to declining soil fertility was the beginning of the gradual process of disintegration of this form of communality within the pasture lands of commune. This final process began on the fringes of the rundale system rather than in the essential core of the system – the arable infield. The reason for this was that root crops and artificial grasses not only needed to be physically enclosed, they were also winter-sown crops. This could not be done if the rundale commune wanted to maintain its communality within the arable infield. McCourt sees the consequences of such alternatives:

In such circumstances, the ultimate solution lay with the ‘new husbandry’ – the introduction into the rotation of root crops and green fallow, usually clover, which provided alternative fodder in winter and summer, and enhanced soil fertility. However, being winter crops, the stubbles could no longer be thrown open to the stock after harvest in the traditional way. The alternative was to consolidate and enclose the infield, creating compact holdings more attuned to the production of a commercial surplus. (McCourt 1981: 25)

The inability of green fallow to integrate itself into the arable infield was not just determined by the communality of changedale, but also by the customary time restraints of booleying. The booleying of livestock from the infield to the mountain pastures and back again was the determining factor in the timing of sowing and harvesting of the arable crops. There was a dramatic strategy which the rundale commune could take in order to overcome the problem of booleying and crop production. This was to enclose some of the outfield and mountain pastures so that the commune could grow winter-sown potatoes and wheat, which seems to have happened in West Ulster (McCourt 1981: 125), leaving the infield to oats and barley. And it was only a matter of time when the infield would be enclosed, leaving the only remnants of communal land to be mountain commonage and bog. The rundale agrarian commune had now become a patch-work of small enclosed fields which existed beyond the clachan. And becoming such a spatial entity meant that the process of individuality had finally ousted communal property relationship from the infield and the outfield and banished it to the areas of commonage. This all came about because of the inability of the rundale commune to deal with its metabolic rift.

However, the enclosure of the communal pasture lands and the subsequent triumph of individualism over communality were rarely achieved by the communal members themselves, through this process of internal colonialization. What mostly occurred was that the landlords, seeing a very visible decline in the fortunes of the rundale communes, took the opportunity to take back their control of the rundale lands and subsume the members under a rental regime. The Great Famine provided the ideal opportunity for the landlords to send in the crowbar brigade, which Marx dramatically expressed in a headline taken from a Galway newspaper of 1852: ‘The sun that rose on a village sets on a desert’. This recolonizing of their rundale landed estates through enclosure by the landlord class … therefore, is about external stresses on the rundale system and how that communal system was subsumed under a feudal

31

mode of production (Slater and McDonough 1994). We have only concentrated on the internal stresses, in order to adress the essential dynamics of the rundale agrarian commune. The external stresses are about the co-existence of the rundale agrarian commune with other modes of production and that is another story!

11. Conclusion: The significance of socio-ecological metabolic system

What we have attempted to uncover in this essay were the internal tendencies and laws of development of the rundale agrarian commune. In this pursuit we discovered that the system of production was very much prone at the ecological level to soil exhaustion. With Marx’s concept of the primitive communist mode of production we were able to account for the emergence in Ireland of a particular socio-ecological metabolism which created a metabolic rift in the agricultural ecosystem of the rundale agrarian commune. And the specific characteristics of this rundale socio-ecological metabolism were the increasing penetration of individualism over the various communal aspects of the rundale system. This itself was ‘fueled’ by the inability of the commune to cope with its own population growth. These levels of determination formed a complex unity, which we needed to unravel in order to discover the internal dynamics of the rundale agrarian commune.

What we believe is significant in the Marxist approach is how the material form of an object metabolizes with the social and natural forms and their respective processes in which the immediate forms are mere moments in a constant state of flux. An agricultural product is not just a physical amalgamation of nutrients it also possesses diverse social forms which can be valorized under various social conditions. For example, an agricultural product can realize itself as a commodity with exchange value in the market place. But that same money form of the agricultural product can be partly used to purchase seed or pay the rent, or even provide a donation to the priest. Accordingly, the exchange form of the original product becomes a moment in the social processes of the rental system, the circulation process of circulating and fixed capitals and the social costs of reproduction. The same physical object simultaneously performs functions for the natural ecosystem and the social processes of production. Crucially the material object of the agricultural product acts as a conduit for the natural and social processes that not only pass through the physical entity but also structure that entity in their metabolizing movements. For example, a potato, if left to natural evolutionary propensities, as a moment in the natural ecosystem, will eventually rot and return its nutrients to the soil. But, when the same potato is metabolized as a mere moment of a social process, it is destined to be physically appropriated by society either as a commodity or a means of human subsistence, and its departure from its immediate ecosystem will create a rift in the soil nutrient cycle – a metabolic rift. In this context crop production under whatever agricultural system will give rise to a metabolic rift with regard to the original ecosystem that ‘produced’ the crop as it is removed from that ecosystem. Therefore, the concept of metabolic rift is very much part of the natural ecosystem, although it is a disruption in the flow of the ecosystem’s nutrients. But, crucially, what determines this metabolic rift in the natural nutrient cycle is the specific social form in which our potato is embedded. For example, if the potato is to be a commodity, its respective nutrients will be lost forever as it gets traded to far-off locations through a market system. However, if it is destined to be consumed locally as a means of subsistence, its encased nutrients may make it back into its ecosystem of origin. But this depends on the manuring practices carried out by the crop cultivators. If the human excrement is actually collected and reapplied to the depleted original ecosystem, then the

32

metabolic rift is overcome. But, in reality, nutrients ‘harvested’ from other soil locations is more likely to happen as we discovered when the grazing cattle of the rundale commune were gathering nutrients while grazing from the communal pasture lands and the individual families were spreading them as manure onto their respective tillage plots of the infield. Consequently, it is the socio-ecological metabolic process rather than the metabolic rift that becomes the more significant determination in the overall flow of nutrients out of and into the ecosystem of the farmed lands. It is the specific social conditions under which the direct cultivators work in their labour processes that determine the flow of nutrients. The metabolic rift is therefore a mere consequence of the socio-ecological practices performed by the agricultural producers which are themselves determined by the specific mode of production under which these producers are working. The socio-ecological metabolism of the mode of production becomes the essential level of analysis in which we can explore further our societal relationship with nature. And Marx’s legacy to us of the twenty-first century is that he has provided us with the necessary roadmap to continue such a vital intellectual exploration.

Notes

1 Dunlap (1980) coined the term ‘human exemptionalism’ to describe this academic trend.
2 See also Benton 1994, and Foster 1999.
3 ‘Queens School’, in this sense, refers broadly to subsequent (mainly doctoral) graduates of the Queen’s Institute of Irish Studies, whose work constitutes the most comprehensive body of collated knowledge on the rundale system to date. For a complete bibliography of McCourt, see C. Thomas 1986, Rural Landscapes and Communities: Essays Presented to Desmond McCourt, Irish Academic Press (A bibliography of the writings of Desmond McCourt: 19–21). For a complete bibliography of Estyn Evans, see R.H. Buchanan, E. Jones and D. McCourt 1971, Man and His Habitat: Essays presented to Emyr Estyn Evans, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul (A bibliography of the writings of E. Estyn Evans: 264–276).
4 Doherty’s comments give an interesting insight into the theoretical underpinnings of early 20th century Irish historical scholarship, most notably the broad ‘Darwinian assumptions of unilinear development’ occluding the possibility of nucleation in early Irish settlement patterns (Doherty 1999: 56).
5 According to Evans,

There is no incontrovertible evidence for the existence of the single-farm system in pre- Celtic Ireland, but both literary and archaeological evidence shows that the raths, cashels and crannogs of the Gaels were the isolated homes of chieftains and freemen. Where then did the peasantry live? Neither history nor archaeology furnishes us with much evidence, but working back from the recent past, we can say that the traditional unit of settlement accompanying rundale or infield/outfield system … was the hamlet or kin-cluster. Both clustered settlement and some kind of infield/outfield agriculture have their historical parallels in Highland Celtic Britain, and these cultural traits have accordingly beenlabelled Celtic … (Evans 1992: 53)

6 Andrews points out the distinctions between Evans’s approach and that of the broader established tradition of Historical Geography. His situating anthropogeographic generalization against historical- geographical specialism allows us to glimpse something of the broader paradigmatic debates occurring in geography throughout the 1970s. Notwithstanding, the implications of Evans’s work are of a relatively static and unchanging society of Celtic descent, ‘who live in clustered kin groups and practise something analogous to rundale cultivation, remaining largely unchanged until 18th century market influences begin to undermine the peasant economy’ (Andrews 1974: 1).

7 The ‘peasant model’ that emerged from Evans’s work faced subsequent criticism in the context of T. Jones Hughes’s writings on the diversity of pre-famine Irish class structure:

33

The peasant scenario elided class differences by ignoring the intense social stratification of pre-Famine Irish life … he established (long before it became fashionable among historians) that pre-Famine Ireland was not an undifferentiated mass of unrelieved poverty and that class, itself determined by broader economic forces, was the key to understanding Irish settlement history in the post-seventeenth-century period. (T. Jones- Hughes, cited in Whelan 1999: 188)

Kevin Whelan has attempted to overcome the reductionist models of Irish society as expounded by authors such as Evans, developing a pluralist schema of regional archetypes to overcome the epistemological limitations of earlier work – the ‘deceptive homogeneity’ – and, in relation to the archetype of the small farm, he locates the emergence of rundale clearly within a context of functional adaptation (Whelan 1999: 190 and Whelan 1995: 24).

8 Gibbons has placed similar emphasis:

Concern for others in extreme situations was not discretionary, a matter of private charity or philanthropy, but was part of the underlying connective tissue of society. So far from being obsolete in Ireland, moreover, these sentiments formed the basis of the moral economy of the countryside as exemplified by the communalism of the ‘Rundale’ system in Irish agriculture, and the close webs of affiliation through which rural townlands wove their identities. (Gibbons 1997: 253)

9 The extent to which Evans idealized peasant society has been questioned by Crossman and McLoughlin (1994: 90)
10 The debate itself began (and featured prominently in the later works of McCourt) over the accuracy of Seebohm’s, and later Meitzen’s emphasis of the Einzelhof pattern of settlement across Ireland as a seventh-century Celtic continuity, to the exclusion of clustered settlement (McCourt 1971: 127). Subsequent studies and critiques of approaches to the rundale have relied heavily on limiting spatial arguments (Graham 1994: 194).
11 See Doherty (1999: 55–56) and Whelan (1999: 187–188) for a criticism of Evans’s theoretical formulations on peasant society. See Jones-Hughes, ‘Society and Settlement’ (cited in Whelan 1999: 188) for a development of the diversity of class structure; see Graham (1994) for a discussion of the political context of Evans’s writings; see Crossman and McLoughlin (1994: 80) and Graham (1994) for comments on Evans’s noted avoidance of political, religious and class dimensions.
12 Dated February/March, 1881 (Shanin 1983: 117).
13 The problem of interpreting what Marx is attempting to express in the drafts is compounded by his continually eliding the concrete level of analysis with a more abstract level of analysis – the two forms of dualism is an example of this practice.
14 Adjectives applied by Marx across various moments of the social relationships of production. Italics indicate our proposed opposing concept where Marx did not specify one in his original draft.

Property element……………………. collective element
Individual labour……………………..collective labour
Petty/small plot cultivation………….communal cultivation
Individual possession………………..collective possession
Fragmented labour…………………..co-operative and combined/collective labour Personal usufruct…………………….communal usufruct

Private property………………………communal/common/social property Private appropriation……………. ….collective appropriation
Private land…………………………..communal land
Private ownership……………………communal/common ownership Personal labour………………………collective labour

Movable property…………………….fixed property Privately owned house……………….communal house Fragmented tillage/agriculture……….large-scale agriculture Individualist – agriculture…………….collective agriculture Individually owned……………………jointly-owned Augmented labour ……………………co-operative labour Individual production…………………collective production Individual trading……………………..communal trading

34

Scattered means of production………. socially concentrated means of production

15 Marx stated this in the following way: ‘The history of the decline of the primitive communities has to be written (it would be wrong to put them all on the same plane; in historical as in geological formations, there is a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary and other types’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 107, footnote C).

16 See M. Cain and A. Hunt (eds), 1979. Marx and Engels on Law. Academic Press.
17 See M. Head, 2008. Pashukanis: A Critical Reappraisal. Oxford: Routledge-Cavendish (p.32).
18 See Anderson (2007) for comments on Irish manuscript material written by Marx and Engels during the 1860s.
19 ‘Among the Celts, Germans and Slavs community ownership can still be traced historically, and among the Slavs, Germans and also the Celts (rundale) it still exists even in the form of direct (Russia) or indirect (Ireland) feudal bondage’ (F. Engels, 1878 – Engels’s preparatory writings for Anti- Duhring. p. 481), while pasture and bog are in common. But only fifty years ago, cases were frequent in which the arable land was divided in farms which shifted among the tenant-families periodically, and sometimes annually.

According to Maine, ‘the Irish holdings “in rundale” are not forms of property, but modes of appropriation’. But the lad himself remarks: ‘archaic kinds of tenancy are constantly evidence of ancient forms of proprietorship … Superior ownership arises through purchase from small allodial proprietors, through colonization of village waste-lands become in time the lord’s waste, or (in an earlier stage) through the sinking of whole communities of peasants into villeinage, and through a consequent transformation of the legal theory of their rights. But even when a chief or lord has come to be recognized as legal owner of the whole tribal domain, or great portions of it, the accustomed methods of occupation and cultivation are not altered’ (Marx 1881: 5).

20 Marx refers to this trend in the following way:

Where property exists only as communal property, the individual member as such is only the possessor of a particular part of it, hereditary or not, for any fraction of property belongs to no member for himself, but only as the direct part of the community, consequently as someone in direct unity with the community and not as distinct from it. The individual is therefore only a possessor. What exists is only communal property and private possession. (Marx 1964: 75)

21 Writing of Tory Island, Fox describes the presence of equal opportunity to access the communal land in the following way:

Every child of a landholder has a right to a portion of his or her land, no matter what happens to the land, all the heirs retain a claim to it … But that every heir has a right, and can make a claim, does not mean that every heir gets a portion. Some will, some will not. Some will press their claims and be denied, others simply will not press them at all. But, in the end, every household will end up with some land … (Fox 1979: 99)

22 In Béaloideas, the Irish Folklore Journal, Seamus Ó Duilearga stated the following:

The principle of rundale was that each legitimate participant in the division should get not an equal amount of land in superficial extent, but an equal amount in value. If the farm lay on a hillside, each person in the division got some of the good land below and some of the poor land high up the hill. (Ó Duilearga 1939: 290)

23 In Mayo, this cow’s grass was called a collop and in Ulster it was known as a sum. These ‘units’ would be broken down further where a sum equals three parts of a horse, four sheep, eight goats or twenty geese. (Evans 1967: 36)
24 In one of his letter drafts to Vera Zasulich, Marx stated this tendency in the following way with regard to the communal arable ground:

The members, without studying the theory of ground-rent, realized that the same amount of labour expended upon fields with a different natural fertility and location would produce different yields. In order to [secure the same economic benefits and] equalize the chances of

35

labour, they therefore divided the land into a number of areas according to natural and economic variations, and then subdivided these areas into as many plots as there were tillers. Finally, everyone received a patch of land in each area. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 122)

25 Knight’s original footnote.
26 See Mac Cnáimhsí 1970: 83 for how fighting acted as a bar to improvement through disputes over lot

quality.
27 See Uhlig 1961 for a discussion of the agricultural commune in Western and Central European context. See in particular Uhlig (1961: 291–293) for a discussion of the ‘The clachans of Ireland’ with comparisons to the Germanic form.
28 Evans invokes the term ‘clachan’ to differentiate functional settlement (defined as former nuclei of townlands, containing services such as shops and inns) from those associated with rundale:

Here and there, especially in the west, we see little ‘clusters’ ‘onsets’ or ‘clachans’ of peasant houses, a dozen or so together … the houses were clustered without plan or order (and never strung together end-to-end) generally in some sheltered hollow in the richest part of the townland … the village had neither shop nor inn, and required little besides salt and iron from the market town. These self-sufficing communities were held together by blood ties and by the exchange of services under the Irish open-field or ‘rundale’ system of cultivation. (Evans 1967: 47–50)

29 The following report of the Ordnance Survey for Co. Donegal confirms the lack of fencing, under the Rundale system:

There are large districts totally unenclosed … cattle during the winter being permitted to roam at large, destroying the wretched fences now in use, they must be consequently made a new each successive spring. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Iniskeel, Co. Donegal,

30 Royal Irish Academy, Box 21, ms, p.5)
Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Desertagney, Co. Donegal, Royal Irish Academy, Box 21,mss:

9–10.
31 Marx identified the financial guns that pounded the walls of the Russian agrarian commune with the following question:

How can the commune resist, pounded by state exactions, plundered by trade, exploited by landowners, and undermined from within by usury! (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: [p?]).

Similar guns had the rundale communes in their sights. Nixon, for example, attempted to impose poor law tariffs upon his tenants, despite their valuations falling below the £4 threshold (Mac Cnáimhsí, 1970: 193). The practice of ‘taxing’ rundale sub-tenants through increasing rates in accordance with agricultural prices is noted by Cunningham (1981: 30).

32 The mere existence of the rent payments between the rundale commune and the landlord, coupled with payments for governmental taxation such as county cess and poor law, and church tithes would be sufficient in itself to force the rundale commune into commodity production. But, the commune had also to pay a certain amount to cover production costs such as seeds, spades and milking equipment, and like everyone in Ireland at the time they had social costs – marriages, church dues, dress and when necessary purchased food. Although the rundale village lacked elements of a real village, such as an inn and shops, this does not suggest that they did not buy and sell commodities. Evans suggests the following:

Itinerant ‘tinkers and tailors’ paid periodic visits and with the peddlers and beggars brought news of other districts, but the economic and social needs of the hamlet were met by periodic visits to the fairs and by seasonal gatherings of various kinds. (Evans 1979: 31)

33 Knight (1836) also remarked on the extent of illicit distillation in Erris.
34 Such enclosures on the Nixon and Leitrim estates in Donegal, and the resultant stress placed upon the rundale has been discussed by Mac Cnáimhsí (1970) and Mac Aoidh (1990).

36

35 See McCourt: ‘Even when it is evident that fragmentation had occurred through the subdivision of an original group of two, three contiguous farms, these in the beginning were also often held in severalty’ (McCourt 1971: 131). See also Currie on the various circumstances through which rundale emerged in Derry: ‘… (iii) the need for co-operation in clearing, enclosing and draining land which would have been beyond the technical and financial capacity of the individual tenant, despite the fact that contemporary leases lay the responsibility for such work on the lessee and not the landlord; (iv) the abundance of marginal land especially mountain, bog, and natural meadow which was ‘conducive toexploitation by the communal methods of rundale’ (Currie 1986: 100).

36 Downes and Downey explore the concept and dynamics of ‘systems’ in detail (see Downes and Downey 2009).
37 Evans even suggested that:

The Irish clachan was often placed at the infertile apex of a deltaic fan, the slope facilitating the washing and carrying-down of the accumulated manure, human as well as animal. (It is an interesting detail that for this purpose the women went with the cows and the men with the horses). (Evans 1956: 299)

38 However, it should be stressed that, although the use of seaweed as a fertilizer was extremely beneficial to the potato crop, it had detrimental effects on other crops, as the following quotation from the Ordnance Survey Reports from Donegal suggests:

Their land they say does not answer for oats and flax, and this defect they attribute to the constant use of sea manure. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835, Parish of Clondavaddog, Co. Donegal).

References

Almquist, E., 1977. Mayo and Beyond: Land Domestic Industry and Rural Transformation in the Irish West. Boston: Boston University PhD.

Anderson, J., 1995. ‘Rundale, Rural Economy and Agrarian Revolution: Tirhugh 1715– 1855’, in W. Nolan, L. Ronayne and M. Dunlevy (eds), Donegal: History and Society. Dublin: Geography Publications. [pp?]

Anderson, Kevin B., 2007. ‘Marx’s late writings on non-Western and precapitalist societies and gender’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 14: 84–96.

Andrews, J.H., 1974. ‘The Ethnic factor in Irish Historical Geography’. Presentation to the Annual Conference of Irish Geographers.

Andrews, J.H., 1977. ‘The Geographical Study of the Irish Past’. Presentation to the Annual Conference of Irish Geographers.

Banaji, Jairus, 1979. ‘From commodity to capital: Hegel’s Dialectic in Marx’s Capital’, in Diane Elson (ed.), Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: CSE Books. [pp?]

Bell, J., 2008, ‘Rundale in the Glens of Antrim’, Ulster Folklife, 52, 38–59. Benton, Ted, 1991. ‘Biology and Social Science: Why the return of the repressed

should be given a cautious welcome’, Sociology, 25, 1–29.
Benton, Ted, 1996. ‘Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and

Reconstruction’, in T. Benton (ed.), The Greening of Marxism. London:

Guildford.
Bonner, B., 1969. ‘Distilling – Illicit and Otherwise in Inishowen’, Donegal Annual,

8(1) [pp?].
Buchanan, R.H., 1958. The Barony of Lecale, County Down, A Study of Regional

Personality. Belfast: Queens University, PhD. Thesis.
Buchanan, R.H., 1970. ‘Rural Settlement in Ireland’ in N. Stephens and R. Glasscock

(eds), Irish Geographical Studies. Belfast: Queens University.

37

Buchanan, R.H, E. Jones and D. McCourt, 1971. Man and His Habitat: Essays presented to Emyr Estyn Evans. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul.

Buchanan, R.H., 1973. ‘Field Systems of Ireland’, in A.R. Baker and R.A. Butlin (eds), Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles. Cambridge. [publisher? Pp?]

Buchanan, R.H., 1984. ‘Historical Geography of Ireland Pre–1700’, in Irish Geography: The Geographical Society of Ireland, Golden Jubilee, 1934–1984. Dublin: The Geographical Society of Ireland.

Cain, M. and A. Hunt (eds), 1979. Marx and Engels on Law. London: Academic Press.

Collins, J., 2008. Quickening the Earth: Soil Minding and Mending in Ireland. Dublin: UCD Press.

Crossman, C. and D. McLoughlin, 1994. ‘A Peculiar Eclipse: E. Estyn Evans and Irish Studies’, The Irish Review, 15, 79–96.

Cunningham, J. B., 1981. ‘William Conolly’s Ballyshannon Estate, 1718–1726’, Donegal Annual, 33, 27–44.

Currie, E.A., 1986. ‘Settlement changes and their measurement: a case study from Co. Londonderry, 1833–1906’, in R.H. Buchanan (ed.), Rural Landscapes and Communities: Essays presented to Desmond McCourt. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. [pp?]

DeLaveleye, E., 1878. Private Property. Dublin: MacMillan & Co.
Dewar, D., 1812. Observations on the character, customs and superstitions of the

Irish. London: Gale and Curtis.
Doherty, C., 1999. ‘Settlement in Early Ireland: A Review’, in T. Barry (ed.), History

of Settlement in Ireland. Florence KY: Routledge. 50–80.
Douglas, J.N.H., 1963. ‘Emigration and Irish Peasant Life’, Ulster Folklife, 9:11 Downes, M. and L. Downey, 2009. ‘Farming Systems’. Paper presented to the

Agricultural History Society of Ireland, Dublin, March 2009.
Dunlap, Riley E., 1980. ‘Paradigmatic Change in Social Science: From Human

Exemptions to an Ecological Paradigm’, American Behavioral Scientist, 24,

5–14.
Engels, F., 1878. Engels’s preparatory writings for Anti-Duhring. London: Martin

Lawrence.
Engels, F., 1884. The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State. Peking:

Foreign Languages Press.
Engels, F., 1888. The Communist Manifesto. 1998: Verso edition.
Evans, E. Estyn, 1939. ‘Some Survivals of the Irish Openfield System’, Geography,

24, 24–36.
Evans, E. Estyn, 1956. ‘The Ecology of Peasant life in Western Europe’, in W.

Thomas (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Washington:

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. [pp.]
Evans, E. Estyn, 1967. Irish Heritage, Dundalk: Dundalgan Press.
Evans, E. Estyn, 1979. Irish Folk Ways, London: Routledge.
Evans, E. Estyn, 1992. The Personality of Ireland. Dublin: The Lilliput Press.
Foster, John Bellamy, 1999. ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations

for Environmental Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 366–

405.
Foster, John Bellamy, 2002. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York:

Monthly Review.

38

Foster, T.C., 1846. Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland. Dublin. [publisher?]

Fox, J. R., 1966. ‘Kinship and Land Tenure on Tory Island’, Ulster Folklife, 12, 1–17. Fox, J.R., 1979. The Tory Islanders, A People of the Celtic Fringe. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Freeman, T.W., 1965, Ireland: A General and Regional Geography. London:

Methuen & Co.
Gailey, R.A., 1970. ‘Irish Corn-Drying Kilns’, in D. McCourt and R.A. Gailey (eds),

Studies in Folklife. Belfast: Ulster Folk Museum. [pp.?]
Gibbons, L., 1997. ‘Doing Justice to the Past: The Great Famine and Cultural

Memory’, in T. Hayden (ed.), Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the

Legacy of the Famine. Roberts Reinhart Publishers. [pp.?]
Gibbs, F., 1870. English Law and Irish Tenure. London: W. Ridgway.
Graham, J., 1954. Transhumance in Ireland with Special Reference to its Bearing on

the Evolution of Rural Communities. Belfast: Queens University, PhD. Thesis. Graham, B.J., 1994. ‘The Search for the common ground: Estyn Evans’s Ireland’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 19, 183–201.
Head, M., 2008. Pashukanis: A Critical Reappraisal. Oxford: Routledge-Cavendish. Hill, G., 1887. Facts from Gweedore. Dublin: P.D. Hardy.
Johnson, J.H., 1959. ‘Population Movements in Co. Derry, During the Pre-Famine

Year’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 60: 155. [pp?]
Knight, P. 1836. Erris in the Irish Highlands and the Atlantic railway. Dublin: M.

Keene.
Krader, L., 1974. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Assen: Van Gorcum. Lewis, S., 1837. A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland. London: S. Lewis and Co. Mac Aoidh, S., 1990. ‘Nixon – A Tyrant Landlord’, Donegal Annual, 42, 45–48. Mac Cnáimhsí, B., 1970. ‘North-West Donegal after the Great Famine’, Donegal

Annual, 9(2), 178–202.
Maguire, J., 1978. Marx’s Theory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.
Marx, K, 1964. Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (with an Introduction by Eric

Hobsbawm). London: Camelot Press.
Marx, K., 1973. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
Marx, K., 1975. Capital. Volume 2. London: Penguin.
Marx, K., 1976. Capital. Volume 1. London: Penguin.
Marx, K., 1977. A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. Marx, K., 1978, ‘Record of a speech on the Irish Question Delivered by Karl Marx to

the German Worker’s Educational Association in London on December 18, 1867’, in Marx and Engels: Ireland and the Irish Question. Moscow: Progress Press.

Marx, K., 1981. Capital. Volume 3. London: Penguin.
McCarthy, M., 2002. ‘Writing Ireland’s historical geographies’, Journal of Historical

Geography, 28(4), 534–553.
McCourt, D., 1947. Rundale and its Social Concomitants. Belfast: Queens University,

M.A. Thesis.
McCourt, D., 1955. ‘Infield and Outfield in Ireland’, Economic History Review, 7(3).

39

McCourt, D., 1971. ‘The dynamic quality of Irish rural settlement’, in R.H. Buchanan, E. Jones and D.McCourt (eds), Man and His Habitat: Essays presented to Emyr Estyn Evans. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. [pp?]

McCourt, D., 1981. ‘The Decline of Rundale, 1750–1850’, in P. Roebuck (ed), Plantation to Partition, Essays in Ulster History. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. [pp?]

Nash, C., 2005. ‘Local Histories in Northern Ireland’, History Workshop Journal, 60, [pp?]

Ó Catháin, Séamas and Patrick O’Flanagan, 1975. The Living Landscape: Kilgalligan, Erris County Mayo. Dublin: Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, An Coláiste Ollscoile.

Ó Danachair, Caoimhín, 1981. ‘An Rí (The King): An example of Traditional Social Organisation’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 111, 14– 28.

Ó Duilearga, Séamus, 1939. ‘Varia: Reliques of the Brehon Laws and other Ancient Usages in Ulster’, Béaloideas, 9, 288–97.

Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1834. Academy, Box 21. Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835. Academy, Box 21. Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835. Academy, Box 21. Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835. Academy, Box 21. Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1836.

Academy, Box 21, ms: 11. Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1836. Academy, Box 21, ms: 53. Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1836.

Academy, Box 21, ms: 6. Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1836. Academy, Box 21, ms: 25.

Parish of Clonmany Co. Donegal. Royal Irish Parish of Clondavaddog, Co. Donegal. Royal Irish Parish of Donagh, Co. Donegal. Royal Irish Parish of Donegal, Co. Donegal. Royal Irish Parish of Desertagney Co. Donegal. Royal Irish Parish of Pyemoaghy, Co. Donegal. Royal Irish Parish of Urney, Co. Donegal. Royal Irish
Parish of Inniskeel Co. Donegal. Royal Irish

O’Sullivan, M. and L. Downey, 2008. ‘Post-Medieval Fieldscapes – Part 2: Rundale’, Archaeology Ireland, Autumn, 22–25.

Otway, C., 1841. Sketches in Erris and Tyrawly. Dublin: William Curry. Robertson, W.R., 2007. ‘On the present condition of agriculture in the counties of Cork and Kerry, February 1867 – A Report by W.R. Robertson’, Analecta

Hibernica, no. 40. [pp?]
Robinson, H.A., 1924. Further memories of Irish Life. London. [publisher?] Sayer, D., 1987. The Violence of Abstraction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Shanin, T., 1983. Late Marx and the Russian Road. London: Routledge. Sigerson, G., 1871. History of the Land Tenures and Land Classes of Ireland.

London: Longmans.
Slater, E., 1993, ‘Contested Terrain: Differing Interpretations of Co. Wicklow’s

Landscape’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 3. [pp?]
Slater, E. and T. McDonough, 1994. ‘Bulwark of Landlordism and Capitalism: The

Dynamics of Feudalism in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, in P. Zarembka (ed.), Research in Political Economy, 14: 63–118.

40

Slater, E. and T. McDonough, 2008, ‘Marx on 19th Century Ireland: Analysing Colonialism as a Dynamic Social Process’, Irish Historical Studies, 36 (no. 142), 153–72.

Thomas, C., 1986. Rural Landscapes and Communities: Essays Presented to Desmond McCourt. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

Thompson, J.N., (n.d., circa 1801–1833). Diary, MSS. in private possession, Carndonagh, Co. Donegal.

Tighe, W., 1802. Statistical Observations relating to the county of Kilkenny. Dublin: Graisberry & Campbell.

Uhlig, H., 1961. ‘Old Hamlets with Infield and Outfield Systems in Western and Central Europe’, Geografiska Annaler, 42(1), 285–312.

Wakefield, E., 1812. An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political (2 volumes). London. [publisher?]

Whelan, K., 1995. ‘Pre and post-Famine Landscape Change’, in C. Póirtéir (ed.), The Great Irish Famine, Mercier Press. [pp?]

Whelan, K., 1997. ‘The Modern Landscape: From Plantation to Present’, in F.H.A. Aalen, M. Stout and K. Whelan (eds) Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape. Cork: Cork University Press. [pp?]

Whelan, K., 1999. ‘Settlement and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in T. Barry (ed.), History of Settlement in Ireland. London: Routledge. pp187-205.

Yager, T., 2002. ‘What was Rundale and where did it come from?’, Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, 70, 153–186.

Young, A., 1892. Tour of Ireland, 1776–1778. Vol. 1. London: George Bell.

---