as behind a commodity, is human labor – the
intentional practices and social relationships that
makeit (Mitchell, 1995). To understand land-
scape, and to understand the ‘culture’ within
which it exists, requires an examination of
human practices – of forms of labor. Through
labor the landscape is both made and made
known. And in the process of working on and in
landscape so too are people changed, whether
that change is understood at the level of culture
(as with Sauer, and as with the mystified world
in which I can comfortably eat strawberries with-
out knowing or really caring how I came by
them) or at the level of the individual human
body (as with the ruined backs of strawberry
pickers). Labor then, is crucial, as Marx argues
when he describes the fundamental activity that
makes humans human – conscious labor:[Man] opposes himself to Nature as one of her own
forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands,
the natural forces of his own body, in order to appro-
priate Nature’s production in a form adapted to his own
wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing
it, he at the same time changes his own nature.
(1987: 173)And yet, what Marx so clearly recognized, but
which Sauer (who anyway was most interested
in archaic societies) never confronted, is that in
the contemporary capitalist world the labor
power that people bring to nature, like the things
they produce from nature, is alienated– or at
least alienable– from even those who possess it.
‘An immeasurable interval of time,’ Marx con-
tinues, ‘separates the state of things in which a
man brings his labour-power to market for sale
as a commodity, from the state in which labour
was still in its first instinctive stage’ (1987:
173–4).^6 Or, to put that another way, paceSauer,
human culture never does anything: human
‘culture’ does not go to work on nature; people
working under specific historical and geographical
conditions do.
Those specific historical and geographical
conditions – those conditions under which
people oppose themselves to nature as one of its
own forces – are themselves the product of past
work, or past labor: they are the ‘dead labor’ that
makes specificforms of living labor, specific
labor practices, historically and geographically
necessary. In these terms, landscape, as a focus
and object of human labor, is a form of dead
labor. Or as David Harvey has put it, the land-
scape should be ‘regarded ... as a geographically
ordered, complex, composite commodity’ that,
unlike a strawberry, is more or less permanently
‘fixed’ in place (1982: 233). The fixed landscape
thus ‘functions as a vast, humanly created resourcesystem, comprising use values embedded in the
physical landscape, which can be utilized for
production, exchange and consumption’.What landscape is forThe invocation of ‘use values’ is important. The
‘use value’ of the landscape is, as Harvey indi-
cates, threefold. First, it is an instrument of pro-
duction (as with the strawberry fields, packing
sheds, and drip irrigation systems that comprise
the visual scene of the Central Coast strawberry
region). Second, the landscape serves as ‘instru-
ments of consumption’ (Harvey, 1982: 229). Such
instruments of consumption – which can be ‘as
diverse as cutlery and kitchen utensils, refrigera-
tors, television sets and washing machines,
houses, and the various means of collective
consumption such as parks and walkways’ – make
it possible for labor to be reproduced (Mitchell,
1994). As Marx argued, such reproduction
always possesses a definite ‘historical and moral
element’ which often appearsas a set of ‘natural’
and ‘necessary wants’ but which is, in fact, a
product of past social struggle – dead labor
(1987: 168). Finally, the landscape is important
to exchange, both as fixed spaces through which
capital, other commodities, and labor circulate
(Henderson, 1999), and as an alienable ‘product’
(as property) which itself can be exchanged
(Blomley, 1998). To put this last point another
way, while the landscape as product and property
can itself be exchanged, the material landscape
also establishes the conditions under which circu-
lation – a fundamental necessity of capitalism –
can take place. The landscape both has, and is
necessary for the production of, exchange value.
As Henderson (1999), drawing on and develop-
ing the influential ‘Mann–Dickinson’ thesis,^7 has
so insightfully argued, processes of circulation
are critical to capitalist production, and particu-
larly to capitalist agricultural production. Draw-
ing particularly on the second volume of Capital,
Henderson shows that capitalist circulation must
be understood as a series of ‘barriers and inter-
ruptions to capital’ itself (1999: 35). If we under-
stand the most basic form of capitalist circulation
to be the movement of money-capital into the
production process and back out again in the
form of commodities to be sold in the market for
more money than the cost of their constituent
parts and the labor applied in the process of making
them – Marx’s famous M-C-M – then it should
be obvious that this process of circulation is any-
thing but smooth. Capital is ‘frozen in place’, in
the machinery used to produce commodities, in
the land that machinery rests on, in the bodies ofDEAD LABOR AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY 2393029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 239