The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
First posted February 2017
This is a rare work that can see outside of the society in which it was written.
“What is beyond capitalism?” is a question as functionally inconceivable as “What is beyond the universe?”
I loved this book. And I liked my review. Which usually means it was self-indulgent!
I lichen (no apologies) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins to an academic Skeleton Key; it breathes life into any paper, any symposium, any thesis. To attach it to another subject is revitalization: literary theory; neoliberal decay; endocolonialism; genetic speciation.
It approaches scope and breadth as it does minutia—calmly, and with great insight:
In the nineteenth century, when capitalism first became an object of inquiry, raw materials were imagined as an infinite bequest from Nature to man. Raw materials can no longer be taken for granted. In our food procurement system, for example, capitalists exploit ecologies not only by reshaping them but also by taking advantage of their capacities. Even in industrial farms, farmers depend on life processes outside their control, such as photosynthesis and animal digestion. In capitalist farms, living things made with ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control. Many capitalist raw materials (consider coal and oil) came into existence long before capitalism. Capitalists also cannot produce human life, the prerequisite of labor. “Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works.
The matsutake, the mushroom itself, is a trophy and an object of salvage, an alienated commodity and a sustainable foodsource, a symbol of ruin and a metaphor of hope, all the time and at once.
How is this so? The Mushroom at the End of the World is not a book that can be pulled from itself: it is a closed system, complete in its own form. The sketches in the margin draw a sense a reality to the pages—these are not words typed at a desk but worlds lived in, reveled in. The experiences on the page will supplement whatever concepts you attach. Mushroom thrives in the broken landscape of the modern era, leaking its way into the reader’s brain with subtlety and casual grace:
The matsutake forests of Japan and Oregon are different in almost every possible way except one: they would probably be converted to more profitable industrial forests if the price of timber were higher.
Oregon’s matsutake forests, then, also owe their flourishing to the low price of global timber. Matsutake forests in Oregon and central Japan are joined in their common dependence on the making of industrial forest ruin.
Perhaps you imagine that I am trying to dress up this ruin or to make lemonade from lemons. Not at all. What engages me is that wholesale, interconnected, and seemingly unstoppable ruination of forests across the world such that even the most geographically, biologically, and culturally disparate forests are still linked in a chain of destruction.
Things are, and will continue to be. Mushroom, watches it, notes it, mentions it, and gives you time to think about it.
Weeks have passed from finishing this book and returning it the library. I still think of it, its surprising density, its heft as it travels traveled the subways with me for over a month. It was due back at the library—already quite late—and the going rate for my bibliomantic truancy was twenty-five cents per day. In the end, I paid over two dollars, a cost-benefit analysis that more than worked out in my favor. Mushroom would be disappointed in me for applying a discredited economic model to an inherently complex system. C’est la vie.
Except, C’est la vie, non. What about the NYPL patron awaiting this copy? The book wasn’t mine—my agreement was to return it when I said I would—but I simply applied capital to bend the rules in my favor. So I kept the book—because what is two dollars to me in a city where bodega coffee is $3.50?—and someone else goes without. Writ large, this beneficial-to-me contract-breaking underlies the inherent incompatibility of capitalism with the decency; it shows that Adam Smith’s invisible hand is a crock of shit designed to justify self-service, that cost benefit analyses are soulless and destructive. They thrive only because they are easily automated, a danger to society that bolsters a palatable vision of capital accumulation: a simple—and repulsive—way to keep score in an immeasurable and vast existence.
I miss this book. I shouldn’t have kept it longer than my agreed-upon covenant with the library. I want to see it again, but time once spent cannot be recaptured. It is gone now, in the hands of someone else, but it stays with me while I dig through pages of other non-fiction—Weapons of Math Desctruction, The Money Cult—its tendrils wrapping gently around each word, informing my opinions and reminding me that experiences can follow you beyond the page upon which you uncovered them.