Seed Oils, The CIA, and the Metabolic Sh*tshow | Richard Hames Meets Jason W. Moore

Quick Overview

Capitalism's drive for endless accumulation necessitates a progressive simplification and degradation of nature and labor, manifesting in hyperprocessed, toxic foods like lead-contaminated meal replacement drinks, which is part of a larger "metabolic shitshow" stemming from the historical regime of cheap nature and unpaid work required to sustain capitalist expansion.

Key Points: Capitalism inexorably simplifies and fragments the web of life, degrading both soil and the worker to generate unpaid work essential for the engine of endless accumulation, a dynamic that manifests concretely in hyperprocessed food. The problem with modern diets, including ultra-processed foods and meal replacement drinks found to contain lead, is a bodily and biospheric dynamic where simplification leads to toxicity, exemplified by the US having more chronically ill people than any place on the planet. The conventional Marxist rendering of value, focusing only on socially necessary labor time (valorized labor), is incomplete because it evades the essential role of socially necessary unpaid work derived from women, nature, and colonies, which is the true source of labor productivity. Capitalism historically advances through 'cheap nature' regimes, where political accumulation enforces price devaluation of food, energy, and raw materials, famously exemplified by cheap cotton enabling the rise of large-scale industry in the US South. The current economic phase is 'zombie capitalism' or 'ultra monopoly capitalism,' where competitive dynamics have largely ended, leading hypercentralized capital to terminate the conditions of cheap labor by jacking up basic costs like food and housing, setting the stage for political instability. The decline in human fertility, with sperm counts projected to hit zero globally by 2050 according to Shona Swan, is linked to the 'metabolic shitow' composed of plastics, heavy metals, and endocrine disruptors from herbicides and pesticides. The failure of the political left to address public health crises, such as the exposure to the exposome of toxins, has allowed the core critique of corporate power and regulatory capture to be co-opted by the political right, such as in the 'Make America Healthy Again' phenomena.