Metabolizing Development: Ecologies of Labor and Agriculture in Pre-War Japan

• In Event: Marxist Ecology and the Problem of Non-Western Development

Abstract

Metabolic rift theory, generated as it was from Marx’s writings inspired by England’s agricultural revolution, has largely been confined to the analysis of either advanced capitalist nations or contemporary issues related to climate change. As such, application of the concept to the context of late developing countries faces serious challenges. This paper aims to show how the concept can be used to enrich our understanding of the particular dynamics of capitalism in late developing countries, and in doing so offers potential avenues for the concept to grow. Moreover, by revisiting critical issues concerning Japan’s uneven development that were largely cast aside during Cold War revisionism, we intend to show how a Marxist ecological approach can bring new relevancy to questions long debated by Japanese Marxists. Joshua Linkous urges a return to the question of agrarian poverty by examining the largely unexplored history of Japan’s modern famines. By tracing the metabolism of coexisting economic circuits and their divergent paths of subsumption under Japan’s uneven development of capitalism, he shows how the inhabitants of Japan’s northeast region were made to endure the worst elements of what he terms organic and economic famines. Charlotte Ciavarella rereads the concept of feudal remnants in the Japanese literature by arguing that these elements are better understood as community structures implemented to mediate social and ecological metabolisms, opening up communities for capitalist exploitation without any of the attendant development. By examining the subsumption of Japanese and Korean nomadic skin-divers (the ama and haenyeo) into Japan’s seaweed supply-chains, she illustrates how capitalist industry depends on the exploitation and destruction of marginal laborers and their ecologies.

Authors

• Charlotte Ciavarella, Harvard University

• Joshua Linkous, Harvard University