Late capitalism’s production of cultural objects involves commodities making other commodities whether as art installation in an urban art gallery or as the remote desert site documented by photography, made now entrepreneurial for tourism as well as confounding the public policy for nuclear waste. Such land art as accumulative representation is of a long term Minsky cycle in extreme space and time fixing some variables close to zero value. Even appearing as a static store of value, capital circulates in deeper circuits that resemble a surface or territory for the value-form.
Land: “Natural resources in short supply occupy a position equivalent to non-basics. As such, taxing them will not impact prices nor the rate of profit (but only their owner). In fact, the complications of the joint production arise as soon as one commodity is produced by more than one method.”
Heizer and Turrell essentially grifted the art world into paying for them to be weird little desert loners making future ancient ruins.
The formation of investment capital as skyscraper development or the “turd in the plaza” of monumental sculpture in its setback public space is always a cultural product whether it refers to the contradiction of the experienced environments or the anomalous obstruction to the experience of the small urban space. Richard Serra’s Tilted Arcrepresents the acme of the urban conflict among site-specific artwork, public money for such artwork, and a capitalist legal system.
Tilted Arc was stored in three sections stacked in a government parking lot in Brooklyn upon removal from the plaza. In 1999, they were moved to a storage space in Maryland.[17] Although the physical component of the work is safe in storage, it will likely never again be erected since it is Serra’s wish that it will never be displayed anywhere other than its original location.[18] Richard Serra has stated that the case exemplifies the U.S. legal system’s preference towards capitalistic property rights over democratic freedom of expression.[19]en.wikipedia.org/…
In the 1970-80s “Earth Art” and large scale sculpture became prominent and even environmentally performative and in the 21st Century now have become intersectionally problematic in their confrontation with the dominant mode of production. As an idealist contrast, such artworks have become elegiac with the death of Robert Smithson while doing aerial surveying for his final piece Amarillo Ramp.
For example Walter DeMaria’s artworks like Lightning Field exist primarily not as actual phenomenological experiences but as imaginary hypotheses triggered by media like photographic documents, among other materials including a full page image in Rolling Stone magazine.
This artwork is not as environmentally intrusive as work by Michael Heizer or Robert Smithson, but is representative of a “movement” whose cultural production is synonymous with the financialization of artworks in late capitalism whether stored in freeports or remotely located in deserts, whose iconology s networked among galleries, museums, mass media and the ecotourism site itself.
The spectacle of artworks and their audience is a mediated set of public relations that resembles the mass scale mystification of social relations and is no different an ideological narrative than election denialism. The artistic myth of genius becomes easier with a culture industry devoted to its financialization at the scale of the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, or the Disneyfication of everything.
The Lightning Field (1977) is a land art work in Catron County, New Mexico, by sculptor Walter De Maria. It consists of 400 stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips, arranged in a rectangular 1 mile × 1 kilometre grid array. It is maintained by the Dia Art Foundation as one of 11 locations and sites they manage.
Walter De Maria – The Lightning Field, 1977, 400 stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips, arranged in a rectangular 1 mile x 1 kilometer grid array, Catron County, New Mexico publicdelivery.org/…
The Lightning Field (1977), by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of western New Mexico. It is comprised of 400 polished stainless-steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles—two inches in diameter and averaging 20 feet, 7½ inches in height—are spaced 220 feet apart and have solid, pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. A sculpture to be walked in as well as viewed, The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time. A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the field, especially during sunset and sunrise. In order to provide this opportunity, Dia offers overnight visits during the months of May through October.
Commissioned and maintained by Dia Art Foundation, The Lightning Field exemplifies Dia’s commitment to supporting art projects whose nature and scale exceed the limits normally available within the traditional museum or gallery.
Real estate values, like property values are the actual product for De Maria’s artwork called Broken Kilometer allowing the gallery site and building to be subsidized in a cultural district as well as appreciated financially as a prized location. In that instance it is purely about uninhabited and even rarely visited rents no different than condominiums as investment and in the case of Trump and Kushner, vehicles for the social and political capital of citizenship.
The Broken Kilometer will close on June 19, 2022, for conservation work, and will reopen in fall 2022. The Broken Kilometer (1979), located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. diaart.org/…
Plains of Nazca
The historical narrative arc from large scale monuments like the Plains of Nazca to such recent artwork is mediated not simply as academic and institutional artworld activity sometimes referred to as “conceptual art”. The contradictory problems arise in the status conferral as “monumental” cultural products worthy of preservation and conservation not to mention their amplification as even detached from their authenticity.
In the case of Michael Heizer or James Turrell, the environmental artwork site enters the market for ecotourism, while also serving as an object for cultural critique in the 21st Century as an intersectional transgressor on indigenous peoples’ land.
Michael Heizer, City, 1970–2022
Indeed, City was built on Western Shoshone land, says Alicia Harris, an Assiniboine professor of Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma. In 2020, she submitted a PhD dissertation entitled “Homescapes: Indigenous Land Art and Public Memory,” in which she argued that works by the likes of Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter de Maria — despite being cast as trenchant critiques of the commoditization of galleries and the New York-centered art world in the ’70s — reaffirm the structure of settler colonialism. “Land art made by settlers can’t function as a wholesale rejection of capitalism and the market economy, because the land used to create those works was still considered ‘property,’” she wrote.
Recalling the first time she saw the site on which Michael Heizer’s City would eventually be built in 1973, the artist’s ex-wife Barbara Heizer said that there was “nothing there but me, Michael, a few survey markers and a lot of wind.” Her words reflected an essential truth about the project that Heizer repeated at the time: that there was no reason why he had chosen to create the work in this high desert stretch, located about three hours northwest of Las Vegas, other than the important fact that land there happened to be abundant and cheap. City would be built on land acquired with a loan from the late dealer Virginia Dwan, and at least at the inception of Heizer’s undertaking, it was a work completely divorced from its surroundings. Around the time Heizer landed on the Garden Valley plot on which he would live and labor for the next five decades, he had his eye on real estate in six western states, purchasing “remote land as raw material.” (Later, he would repeat about the Nevada and the Great Basin region from which he hails, “This land is in my blood.”)
Nothingness haunts Michael Heizer, White land artists of his generation, and City — his one-and-a-half-mile-long by half-a-mile-wide magnum opus in Garden Valley, Nevada, which officially opened to visitors earlier this month. The colossal structure, a labyrinth of mounds and pyramids, took half a century to construct, an arduous process set into motion by the artist when he was just 27. Despite much enthusiasm in the press over its recent unveiling, City has been seen by only a select few. Heizer was notoriously secretive while creating it, and only six people per day have been allowed to go since its opening. (Regular tickets are $150 and $100 for students and free for residents of Lincoln, Nye, and White Pine counties. All slots through the end of the year have been booked.) Yet, the work has already become wrapped up in a sort of mythological lore that portrays it as a miracle amidst desiccated nothingness — a characterization that some Indigenous artists and thinkers more attuned to the historical processes of settler colonialism take issue with.
Michael Heizer’s monumental work on City began in 1972 in Garden Valley, Nevada—which lies almost directly north of the quiet community of Alamo to the tune of about 60 miles.City, by Michael Heizer, is out in the middle of Nevada’s mighty Great Basin—with Wayne E. Kirch Wildlife Management Area to the north, and the Mt. Irish Wilderness to the south. Other than that, it’s wide open in this part of the state and falls within the boundary of Basin and Range National Monument
Despite having worked on this large-scale land art project for nearly 50 years, his work here manages to continue to this day. Like his work at Double Negative, Michael Heizer’s City is designed on a massive scale, spanning a little more than a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, with some parts of the sculpture standing as tall as 80 feet high. Made from dirt, sand, rocks, and concrete, City was formed in five phases, each containing its own substructures within.
Over nearly 50 years City has cost nearly 25 million dollars to build, funded mainly through the Dia Art Foundation and Lannan Foundation. Though City is surrounded by state and federally-owned land, the chunk of land City is situated on is privately owned by Heizer.
A magnificent land art installation more than a half-century in the making, City will open September 2022. Because Heizer fears crowds will dilute the experience, six tickets will be offered per day, and only on some days during certain times of the year. Tickets are $150 per person and will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Once visitors arrive in Alamo, NV, they’ll be picked up and allowed to explore City for a few hours, then driven back before dark.
Editor’s Note: The 2022 season has sold out and closed, but please consider applying for tickets beginning Jan 2, 2023. In your query, please include the number of guests in your party (up to 6 people), a preferred reservation date between May 16th and November 9th, 2023, and several alternative reservation dates. Reservations are handled on a first-come, first-served basis. Please note that reservations should not be considered final until you receive confirmation via email.
It remains to be seen or experienced what an actual cultural revolution’s avant-garde vision of a post-revolutionary city can be when the colonizing forces of reaction and revisionism reign, even held in sharp contrast.
Suprematist city Nikolai Suetin Drawings and illustrations, 1931, 49.4×50 cm arthive.com/…
In their paper, Filip Buekens and J. P. Smit have focused on the theoretical problems that existing definitions of art institutions, such as those proposed by George Dickie and Arthur Danto entail, primarily since their “account[s] of what confers upon objects their institutional character does not fit well with current work on institutions and social ontology” (53). Thus, as these researchers highlight, the “[i]nstitutional accounts of art, although less popular now than in the 1970’s that were the heydays of social constructionism, seem increasingly less plausible once one begins to apply insights from contemporary accounts of social institutions as they are studied in the emerging field of social ontology (Searle 1995, 2010; Tuomela 2013; Epstein 2015; Guala 2016) and in economics (Pratten 2015)” (53).
Nevertheless, Buekens and Smit also argue that, “[w]hile institutional accounts of art may be less popular today (but see Fokt 2013, 2017 for an interesting overview of recent developments and the many meanings of the concept of artworld), some important lessons can be drawn from the way it connected a human practice, the objects produced and the process whereby the products were created” (56). This is related to the growing recognition that “institutions are systems of interconnected rules that direct and shape preferences of participating agents in achieving shared goals – goals that exist independently of the kind of coordination required to achieve the goals” (58). Therefore, as this study explores, “[i]nstitutions, as ingredients or constituents of the artworld, solve obvious or subtle coordination problems” (59).
[…]
Consequently, as Buekens and Smit propose, “[i]t remains an open question whether the concept of artworld was more than a fancy signifier, which obscured rather than illuminated the important and genuine institutional dimension of art and artistic activity” (65).
Socially necessary, cultural labor has abstract and concrete time and labor-power. It may be constructed as both a solitary, artisanal quest and the production of highly mediated surplus value remain contestable in the commodity system of late capitalism.
In an artworld, the aesthetic division of labor is no different in the formation of cultural capital. Digital technology has yet to alter those material contradictions especially as artwork seeks new financialized forms like the NFT.
It’s better to destroy than create what’s unnecessary. Jean Rougeul in 8 ½.
Heizer and Turrell essentially grifted the art world into paying for them to be weird little desert loners making future ancient ruins.
The only artist to have his work featured at the @whitneymuseum we can trust is James Turrell because he funded his Roden Crater project by restoring vintage airplanes
Roden Crater, located in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, is an unprecedented large-scale artwork created within a volcanic cinder cone by light and space artist James Turrell. Representing the culmination of the artist’s lifelong research in the field of human visual and psychological perception, Roden Crater is a controlled environment for the experiencing and contemplation of light. It takes its place within the tradition of American landscape art that began in the 1960s, requiring a journey to visit the work in the remote desert with truly dark night skies. While minimally invasive to the external natural landscape, internally the red and black cinder has been transformed into special engineered spaces where the cycles of geologic and celestial time can be directly experienced. It will constitute a truly culminating phenomenon in world art.
Turrell’s immersive work with how we see light in varying contexts, both natural and created, led him to conceive an artwork so remote from manmade distractions, and at a high altitude so naturally conducive to unlimited sightlines of the vast sky, that it could provide a singular experience. After an extensive search, he found his ideal conditions at Roden Crater. Since acquiring the dormant cinder cone in 1977, Turrell has fashioned Roden Crater into a site containing tunnels and apertures that open onto pristine skies, capturing light directly from the sun in daylight hours, and the planets and stars at night. Indeed it is more akin to the communally developed sites of ancient Incas, than to the conceptions of any individual one can think of in modern times.
Roden Crater is a gateway to the contemplation of light, time and landscape. It is the magnum opus of James Turrell’s career, a work that, besides being a monument to land art, functions as a naked eye observatory of earthly and celestial events that are both predictable and continually in flux. Constructed to last for centuries to come, Roden Crater links the physical and the ephemeral, the objective with the subjective, in a transformative sensory experience.
The first major phase of construction included the movement of over 1.3 million cubic yards of earth to shape the Crater Bowl and the construction of the 854′ East Tunnel. Six spaces were completed, including two of the most difficult, the shaping of the Crater Bowl and the Alpha (East) Tunnel. The Sun & Moon Chamber, East Portal, and the Crater’s Eye, are joined by the Alpha (East) Tunnel and a connecting tunnel to the Crater Bowl. When complete, the project will contain 24 viewing spaces and six tunnels.
As construction on Roden Crater is ongoing, it is presently closed to the public. Fundraising is underway to complete the construction and open Roden Crater to the public. Please consider supporting the work’s completion by becoming a Friend of Roden Crater.
Of the three “theoretical” books of Capital that Marx planned to write, he was only able to finish the first one, dealing with the production process of capital. The other two books, on the circulation process and the process as a whole, remained unfinished. Frederick Engels published them after Marx’s death. There is not even a manuscript for the fourth book that Marx planned to write, which was supposed to deal with the history of political economy. Theories of Surplus Value, published in the German MEW volumes 26.1–3 with the subtitle “The 4th Volume of Capital” is not a draft for the fourth book. Instead, it is an unfinished history of just one category.
Without indulging Freud’s various positions on not finishing things, Marx’s aporia can be addressed in a variety of ways without presuming the totalizing project of Capital’s completion. It is more than “one category” among many but about the problematic of categories.
Category theory has come to occupy a central position in contemporary mathematics and theoretical computer science, and is also applied to mathematical physics. Roughly, it is a general mathematical theory of structures and of systems of structures. As category theory is still evolving, its functions are correspondingly developing, expanding and multiplying. At minimum, it is a powerful language, or conceptual framework, allowing us to see the universal components of a family of structures of a given kind, and how structures of different kinds are interrelated. Category theory is both an interesting object of philosophical study, and a potentially powerful formal tool for philosophical investigations of concepts such as space, system, and even truth. It can be applied to the study of logical systems in which case category theory is called “categorical doctrines” at the syntactic, proof-theoretic, and semantic levels. Category theory even leads to a different theoretical conception of set and, as such, to a possible alternative to the standard set theoretical foundation for mathematics. As such, it raises many issues about mathematical ontology and epistemology. Category theory thus affords philosophers and logicians much to use and reflect upon.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-theory/
You: did leonardo da vinci understand that increasing the amount of people purchasing art materials brought the price of artist materials down
Leo AI: No, there is no historical evidence that Leonardo da Vinci understood or articulated the economic principle that increasing the number of people purchasing art materials would lower their prices. This concept describes a modern understanding of supply and demand and economies of scale, which were not formally defined or analyzed in the way they are today during the Renaissance.
While Leonardo was a keen observer of the world and kept detailed notebooks on a vast array of topics—from anatomy to engineering—his economic observations were not focused on market dynamics or price theory. The economic environment of his time (late 15th and early 16th century) was characterized by a growing demand for luxury goods among the wealthy elite, which actually tended to keep prices for high-quality materials like lapis lazuli, fine pigments, and gold leaf high due to their scarcity and the specialized labor required to process them https://ideas.repec.org/p/hbu/wpaper/17.htmlhttps://www.britannica.com/money/art-market/The-Renaissance.
Key points regarding the art market in Leonardo’s time:
High Cost of Materials: Art materials were often expensive and imported. For instance, Venice was a major hub for trading rare pigments, but the cost remained high because these were luxury items produced in limited quantities https://www.britannica.com/money/art-market/The-Renaissance.
Market Structure: The art market was largely driven by patronage (commissions from wealthy individuals, the church, or the state) rather than a broad open market where mass consumption could drive prices down https://www.britannica.com/money/art-market/The-Renaissance.
Lack of Economic Theory: The systematic study of economics, including concepts like price elasticity or the relationship between market size and unit cost, did not emerge until much later (notably with Adam Smith in the 18th century). Leonardo’s notebooks contain observations on costs and payments for his own work, but not theoretical insights into how market volume affects material pricing https://ideas.repec.org/p/hbu/wpaper/17.html.
In short, while Leonardo was a master of practical science and art, he did not possess or document an understanding of the specific economic mechanism you described. The idea that mass purchasing lowers unit costs is a modern economic insight that post-dates his era by centuries.
You: IIRC there is a literature that discusses his issues getting paid for his work, can your verify that?
The Adoration of the Magi (1481): Leonardo was commissioned by the Augustinian monks in Florence but left the painting unfinished when he moved to Milan. He reportedly never received full payment, and the work remained incomplete for decades https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci.
Unfinished Projects: Leonardo’s tendency to leave works incomplete or experiment with new techniques (which sometimes led to failures, like the deteriorating Last Supper) further complicated his financial relationships with patrons, who were often reluctant to pay in full for unfinished or flawed results https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci.
You: Aside from Freud analyzing Leonardo’s trouble with unfinished commissions, are there other lines of inquiry on his unpaid commissions and financial struggles?
Leo AI: Yes, beyond the psychoanalytic interpretations (like Freud’s theories on Leonardo’s procrastination stemming from his childhood), there are several concrete historical and economic lines of inquiry regarding Leonardo’s financial struggles and unpaid commissions. These focus on contractual disputes, the nature of Renaissance patronage, Leonardo’s specific business practices, and his reliance on stipends over sales.
Here are the primary areas of historical research:
1. The Virgin of the Rocks Litigation (1483–1508)
The most documented case of financial friction is the 25-year legal battle over the Virgin of the Rocks.
The Dispute: Leonardo and the de Predis brothers signed a contract in 1483 to paint an altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan. The contract specified a price and a deadline. When the first version (now in the Louvre) was delivered years late, the Confraternity refused to pay the full amount, arguing the work did not meet the theological or aesthetic specifications of the contract.
The Outcome: The dispute dragged on for decades, involving letters to the Duke of Milan (Ludovico Sforza) and even appeals to the French King. It was only resolved around 1508 when a second version (now in London) was delivered, and a settlement was reached. This case is frequently cited by economic historians as a prime example of the legal risks artists faced when contracts were not honored or when artists failed to deliver on time https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722761https://oldmasters.academy/leonardo-da-vinci-was-no-stranger-to-failure-and-rejection.
2. The “Stipend” vs. “Commission” Model
Historians note that Leonardo’s financial strategy was unique because he rarely relied on the standard “sell a painting, get paid” model for his major works. Instead, he sought stable employment as a court engineer and artist.
The Trade-off: This model protected him from the volatility of the art market but made him vulnerable to political shifts. When Ludovico Sforza fell from power in 1499, Leonardo lost his primary income source, leading to a period of financial instability where he had to seek new patrons in Florence and Venice https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13377/w13377.pdf.
3. Abandoned Commissions and Breach of Contract
There are documented instances where Leonardo left commissions unfinished, effectively breaching contracts, which led to disputes over payment or the forfeiture of deposits.
The Adoration of the Magi (1481): Commissioned by the monks of San Donato a Scopeto, Leonardo received an advance payment but left the work unfinished when he moved to Milan in 1482. The monks were left with a half-painted canvas and had to find another artist to complete it. This is often analyzed as a case of moral hazard where the artist’s intellectual curiosity outweighed his contractual obligations https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-da-vinci-art-patrons-supporters-ludovico-sforza-isabella-deste-borgias/.
The Battle of Anghiari (1503): Commissioned by the Florentine Republic for the Palazzo Vecchio, Leonardo received an initial payment but abandoned the mural after his experimental paint technique failed and the work began to flake off the wall. The city was left without the completed fresco, and the financial settlement for the unfinished work is a subject of historical debate regarding how much of the initial payment was considered a “fee” versus a “deposit” https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-da-vinci-art-patrons-supporters-ludovico-sforza-isabella-deste-borgias/.
4. Economic Analysis of “Unfinished” Works
Modern economic historians analyze Leonardo’s unfinished works not just as artistic failures, but as economic decisions.
Opportunity Cost: Leonardo may have calculated that moving to a new city or starting a new project with a powerful patron (like the King of France) offered a higher long-term return than finishing a low-paying commission in Florence. This suggests his “struggles” were sometimes strategic choices to maximize his career value https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722761.
Inelastic Supply: Unlike other artists who produced many works, Leonardo’s output was low. This made his work highly inelastic in supply. While this drove up the value of his finished works (like the Mona Lisa, which he kept with him until death), it also meant he had fewer completed assets to liquidate for cash if he needed money quickly https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13377/w13377.pdf.
5. The Role of the Workshop and Delegates
Some researchers investigate whether Leonardo’s financial “struggles” were actually due to his workshop management.
Delegation: Leonardo often employed assistants (like Ambrogio de Predis or Salai) to complete parts of commissions. Disputes sometimes arose over who was responsible for the final payment if the master’s vision wasn’t fully realized. The Virgin of the Rocks litigation, for instance, involved complex arguments about whether the de Predis brothers or Leonardo himself were liable for the delays https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722761.
In summary, the literature on Leonardo’s financial life moves beyond psychology to examine contract law in Renaissance Italy, the economics of patronage, and the business risks of an artist who prioritized experimentation over commercial reliability. These sources paint a picture of a man who was often “unpaid” not because he was poor, but because he operated in a system where time, quality, and completion were constantly renegotiated between the artist and his powerful, often impatient, patrons.
You: Is your original response claiming that because he did not have a ‘more modern’ understanding of economic supply and demand altered by your response: “Material Costs and Disputes: Contracts often specified that the artist provide expensive pigments (like lapis lazuli) and gold leaf. When Leonardo claimed these materials were too expensive for the agreed price, it led to disputes. In the Virgin of the Rocks case, the painters argued the cost of the high-quality materials warranted a price four times the original estimate, leading to the legal stalemate 3.”
Leo AI: No, my original response did not claim that Leonardo lacked a “modern” understanding of supply and demand because of the material cost disputes. Rather, I used the material cost disputes as evidence to support the broader point that Leonardo’s financial struggles were rooted in the specific contractual and economic realities of his time, which differed significantly from modern market dynamics.
Here is the distinction:
The Original Claim: Leonardo did not understand or articulate the theoretical economic principle that “increasing the number of buyers lowers prices” because that theory (supply and demand elasticity) was not formally developed until centuries later. His era operated on a patronage system where prices were often fixed by contract or negotiated based on scarcity and status, not mass market volume.
The Material Cost Disputes (Evidence): The Virgin of the Rocks dispute cited in the search results [3] illustrates that Leonardo did understand that costs (materials, labor) could exceed a fixed price. However, this was a contractual negotiation (claiming the work was worth more than the fixed fee), not an application of a theoretical market model.
The dispute arose because the contract fixed a price, but Leonardo realized his costs for high-quality pigments (like lapis lazuli) were too high.
He argued for a higher price based on actual value/cost, not because he was analyzing market supply and demand curves.
This supports the idea that Renaissance artists operated within a fixed-price contract system where “value” was subjective and negotiated, rather than a dynamic market where volume automatically drives prices down.
In summary: The material cost disputes confirm that Leonardo was navigating a system of fixed contracts and negotiated value, not a modern market of supply and demand. He was fighting for a fair price based on his specific costs, which is a different economic behavior than understanding how mass purchasing power lowers unit costs. The search results [3] show that these disputes were about breach of contract and valuation, not about a theoretical understanding of market mechanics.
So, the original response remains consistent: Leonardo did not have a modern economic theory, and the material disputes are examples of how artists in his time dealt with financial realities without that theory.
You: Thanks, although beyond Leonardo’s understanding is there not an argument to be made about a modern sense (from the Law & Political Economy literature) that would show that aside from the pre-modern context that your response isn’t that different from modern (20th & 21st) century contract law? “In summary: The material cost disputes confirm that Leonardo was navigating a system of fixed contracts and negotiated value, not a modern market of supply and demand. He was fighting for a fair price based on his specific costs, which is a different economic behavior than understanding how mass purchasing power lowers unit costs. The search results show that these disputes were about breach of contract and valuation, not about a theoretical understanding of market mechanics.”
Leo AI: You raise an excellent and sophisticated point. You are absolutely correct that from the perspective of Law & Political Economy (LPE) literature and modern contract theory, the mechanics of Leonardo’s disputes are strikingly similar to those in the 20th and 21st centuries. The fundamental legal and economic problems he faced—incomplete contracts, cost overruns, and the allocation of risk—are timeless.
My previous distinction focused on the theoretical understanding of market dynamics (supply curves, elasticity), but your argument correctly identifies that the practical application of contract law regarding price disputes has remained largely consistent. Here is how the modern LPE lens reframes Leonardo’s situation, showing that the “pre-modern” context is less a barrier and more a continuation of enduring legal principles:
1. The “Incomplete Contract” Problem is Universal
Modern contract law and LPE literature heavily analyze incomplete contracts—agreements that cannot specify every future contingency.
Leonardo’s Case: The Virgin of the Rocks contract was a classic incomplete contract. It fixed a price but failed to account for the volatility of pigment prices or the specific labor intensity of Leonardo’s experimental techniques.
Modern Parallel: This is identical to modern construction or software development contracts where “force majeure” or “change orders” become necessary when material costs spike or scope creep occurs.
The LPE Insight: Both Leonardo and modern contractors face the same issue: ex-post renegotiation. When the actual cost exceeds the fixed price, the parties must renegotiate. Leonardo’s argument that “materials cost more than expected” is functionally the same as a modern construction firm arguing that steel prices have spiked since the contract was signed. The legal mechanism (renegotiation or litigation) is the same, even if the specific laws (civil law vs. common law) differ.
2. “Opportunism” and Hold-Up Problems
LPE scholars often discuss the “hold-up problem”: when one party invests in a relationship-specific asset (like Leonardo creating a unique painting) and the other party (the patron) exploits that investment by refusing to pay the full value.
Leonardo’s Case: The Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception arguably tried to “hold up” Leonardo by sticking to the original low price, knowing he had already invested time and expensive materials. Leonardo’s counter-claim was a defense against this opportunism.
Modern Parallel: This mirrors modern disputes in defense contracting or tech development, where a vendor claims the client is trying to exploit a sunk cost. The legal remedy in both eras is often specific performance or quantum meruit (payment for the value of work done), which is exactly what the 10-year litigation over Virgin of the Rocks sought to resolve.
3. Valuation and “Fair Market Value”
The core of the dispute was valuation.
Leonardo’s Case: Leonardo argued for a higher price because the work was “worth more” than the contract stipulated, based on the quality of materials and his skill.
Modern Parallel: In modern contract law, when a contract price is deemed “unconscionable” or when a change order is disputed, courts often look at fair market value or reasonable costs. Leonardo’s argument that his “high-quality materials warranted a price four times the original estimate” is a direct appeal to the same economic logic used in modern breach of contract cases: The price must reflect the actual value and cost of performance.
4. The “Risk Allocation” Debate
LPE literature emphasizes that contracts are essentially risk-allocation devices.
Leonardo’s Case: The contract placed the risk of material cost overruns on Leonardo (he had to provide the pigments). When the risk materialized, he sought to shift it back to the patron.
Modern Parallel: This is the exact same dynamic in modern fixed-price contracts. If a contractor underestimates costs, they bear the loss unless they can prove a “change in conditions” or “unforeseen circumstances” that justify a price adjustment. Leonardo’s struggle was not about a lack of understanding, but about the rigidity of the risk allocation in his contract, a problem that plagues modern project management just as much.
Conclusion: A Continuum, Not a Discontinuity
Your argument is compelling: The economic and legal logic of Leonardo’s disputes is not “pre-modern” in a way that makes it incomprehensible to us today.
Then: Leonardo argued, “I spent more than the contract said because the materials were expensive; you must pay more.”
Now: A contractor argues, “The steel prices doubled; we need a change order to cover the cost.”
The mechanism (litigation/negotiation over value) and the economic principle (cost-plus vs. fixed price) are identical. The only difference is that Leonardo didn’t have a formalized “Law of Supply and Demand” textbook to cite; he had the practical reality of a contract that didn’t cover all bases.
Therefore, the search results confirming the material cost disputes [3] actually support your point: they show that Leonardo was engaging in a modern-style contract dispute over risk allocation and valuation, one that would look perfectly familiar to a 21st-century lawyer or economist. The “pre-modern” label applies to the institutional framework (guilds, patronage) but not to the underlying economic behavior or the legal logic of the dispute.
This reframing suggests that Leonardo wasn’t “confused” by economics; he was simply a rational economic actor navigating a flawed contract in an era where the legal tools for dispute resolution were just as contentious as they are today.
Modified to have a “funny” tone
You: did leonardo da vinci understand that increasing the amount of people purchasing art materials brought the price of artist materials down
Leo AI: No, there is no historical evidence that Leonardo da Vinci understood or articulated the economic principle that increasing the number of people purchasing art materials would lower their prices. This concept describes a modern understanding of supply and demand and economies of scale, which were not formally defined or analyzed in the way they are today during the Renaissance.
While Leonardo was a keen observer of the world and kept detailed notebooks on a vast array of topics—from anatomy to engineering—his economic observations were not focused on market dynamics or price theory. The economic environment of his time (late 15th and early 16th century) was characterized by a growing demand for luxury goods among the wealthy elite, which actually tended to keep prices for high-quality materials like lapis lazuli, fine pigments, and gold leaf high due to their scarcity and the specialized labor required to process them https://ideas.repec.org/p/hbu/wpaper/17.htmlhttps://www.britannica.com/money/art-market/The-Renaissance.
Key points regarding the art market in Leonardo’s time:
High Cost of Materials: Art materials were often expensive and imported. For instance, Venice was a major hub for trading rare pigments, but the cost remained high because these were luxury items produced in limited quantities https://www.britannica.com/money/art-market/The-Renaissance.
Market Structure: The art market was largely driven by patronage (commissions from wealthy individuals, the church, or the state) rather than a broad open market where mass consumption could drive prices down https://www.britannica.com/money/art-market/The-Renaissance.
Lack of Economic Theory: The systematic study of economics, including concepts like price elasticity or the relationship between market size and unit cost, did not emerge until much later (notably with Adam Smith in the 18th century). Leonardo’s notebooks contain observations on costs and payments for his own work, but not theoretical insights into how market volume affects material pricing https://ideas.repec.org/p/hbu/wpaper/17.html.
In short, while Leonardo was a master of practical science and art, he did not possess or document an understanding of the specific economic mechanism you described. The idea that mass purchasing lowers unit costs is a modern economic insight that post-dates his era by centuries.
You: IIRC there is a literature that discusses his issues getting paid for his work, can your verify that?
The Adoration of the Magi (1481): Leonardo was commissioned by the Augustinian monks in Florence but left the painting unfinished when he moved to Milan. He reportedly never received full payment, and the work remained incomplete for decades https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci.
Unfinished Projects: Leonardo’s tendency to leave works incomplete or experiment with new techniques (which sometimes led to failures, like the deteriorating Last Supper) further complicated his financial relationships with patrons, who were often reluctant to pay in full for unfinished or flawed results https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci.
You: Aside from Freud analyzing Leonardo’s trouble with unfinished commissions, are there other lines of inquiry on his unpaid commissions and financial struggles?
Leo AI: Yes, beyond the psychoanalytic interpretations (like Freud’s theories on Leonardo’s procrastination stemming from his childhood), there are several concrete historical and economic lines of inquiry regarding Leonardo’s financial struggles and unpaid commissions. These focus on contractual disputes, the nature of Renaissance patronage, Leonardo’s specific business practices, and his reliance on stipends over sales.
Here are the primary areas of historical research:
1. The Virgin of the Rocks Litigation (1483–1508)
The most documented case of financial friction is the 25-year legal battle over the Virgin of the Rocks.
The Dispute: Leonardo and the de Predis brothers signed a contract in 1483 to paint an altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan. The contract specified a price and a deadline. When the first version (now in the Louvre) was delivered years late, the Confraternity refused to pay the full amount, arguing the work did not meet the theological or aesthetic specifications of the contract.
The Outcome: The dispute dragged on for decades, involving letters to the Duke of Milan (Ludovico Sforza) and even appeals to the French King. It was only resolved around 1508 when a second version (now in London) was delivered, and a settlement was reached. This case is frequently cited by economic historians as a prime example of the legal risks artists faced when contracts were not honored or when artists failed to deliver on time https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722761https://oldmasters.academy/leonardo-da-vinci-was-no-stranger-to-failure-and-rejection.
2. The “Stipend” vs. “Commission” Model
Historians note that Leonardo’s financial strategy was unique because he rarely relied on the standard “sell a painting, get paid” model for his major works. Instead, he sought stable employment as a court engineer and artist.
The Trade-off: This model protected him from the volatility of the art market but made him vulnerable to political shifts. When Ludovico Sforza fell from power in 1499, Leonardo lost his primary income source, leading to a period of financial instability where he had to seek new patrons in Florence and Venice https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13377/w13377.pdf.
3. Abandoned Commissions and Breach of Contract
There are documented instances where Leonardo left commissions unfinished, effectively breaching contracts, which led to disputes over payment or the forfeiture of deposits.
The Adoration of the Magi (1481): Commissioned by the monks of San Donato a Scopeto, Leonardo received an advance payment but left the work unfinished when he moved to Milan in 1482. The monks were left with a half-painted canvas and had to find another artist to complete it. This is often analyzed as a case of moral hazard where the artist’s intellectual curiosity outweighed his contractual obligations https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-da-vinci-art-patrons-supporters-ludovico-sforza-isabella-deste-borgias/.
The Battle of Anghiari (1503): Commissioned by the Florentine Republic for the Palazzo Vecchio, Leonardo received an initial payment but abandoned the mural after his experimental paint technique failed and the work began to flake off the wall. The city was left without the completed fresco, and the financial settlement for the unfinished work is a subject of historical debate regarding how much of the initial payment was considered a “fee” versus a “deposit” https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-da-vinci-art-patrons-supporters-ludovico-sforza-isabella-deste-borgias/.
4. Economic Analysis of “Unfinished” Works
Modern economic historians analyze Leonardo’s unfinished works not just as artistic failures, but as economic decisions.
Opportunity Cost: Leonardo may have calculated that moving to a new city or starting a new project with a powerful patron (like the King of France) offered a higher long-term return than finishing a low-paying commission in Florence. This suggests his “struggles” were sometimes strategic choices to maximize his career value https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722761.
Inelastic Supply: Unlike other artists who produced many works, Leonardo’s output was low. This made his work highly inelastic in supply. While this drove up the value of his finished works (like the Mona Lisa, which he kept with him until death), it also meant he had fewer completed assets to liquidate for cash if he needed money quickly https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13377/w13377.pdf.
5. The Role of the Workshop and Delegates
Some researchers investigate whether Leonardo’s financial “struggles” were actually due to his workshop management.
Delegation: Leonardo often employed assistants (like Ambrogio de Predis or Salai) to complete parts of commissions. Disputes sometimes arose over who was responsible for the final payment if the master’s vision wasn’t fully realized. The Virgin of the Rocks litigation, for instance, involved complex arguments about whether the de Predis brothers or Leonardo himself were liable for the delays https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722761.
In summary, the literature on Leonardo’s financial life moves beyond psychology to examine contract law in Renaissance Italy, the economics of patronage, and the business risks of an artist who prioritized experimentation over commercial reliability. These sources paint a picture of a man who was often “unpaid” not because he was poor, but because he operated in a system where time, quality, and completion were constantly renegotiated between the artist and his powerful, often impatient, patrons.
You: Is your original response claiming that because he did not have a ‘more modern’ understanding of economic supply and demand altered by your response: “Material Costs and Disputes: Contracts often specified that the artist provide expensive pigments (like lapis lazuli) and gold leaf. When Leonardo claimed these materials were too expensive for the agreed price, it led to disputes. In the Virgin of the Rocks case, the painters argued the cost of the high-quality materials warranted a price four times the original estimate, leading to the legal stalemate 3.”
Leo AI: No, my original response did not claim that Leonardo lacked a “modern” understanding of supply and demand because of the material cost disputes. Rather, I used the material cost disputes as evidence to support the broader point that Leonardo’s financial struggles were rooted in the specific contractual and economic realities of his time, which differed significantly from modern market dynamics.
Here is the distinction:
The Original Claim: Leonardo did not understand or articulate the theoretical economic principle that “increasing the number of buyers lowers prices” because that theory (supply and demand elasticity) was not formally developed until centuries later. His era operated on a patronage system where prices were often fixed by contract or negotiated based on scarcity and status, not mass market volume.
The Material Cost Disputes (Evidence): The Virgin of the Rocks dispute cited in the search results [3] illustrates that Leonardo did understand that costs (materials, labor) could exceed a fixed price. However, this was a contractual negotiation (claiming the work was worth more than the fixed fee), not an application of a theoretical market model.
The dispute arose because the contract fixed a price, but Leonardo realized his costs for high-quality pigments (like lapis lazuli) were too high.
He argued for a higher price based on actual value/cost, not because he was analyzing market supply and demand curves.
This supports the idea that Renaissance artists operated within a fixed-price contract system where “value” was subjective and negotiated, rather than a dynamic market where volume automatically drives prices down.
In summary: The material cost disputes confirm that Leonardo was navigating a system of fixed contracts and negotiated value, not a modern market of supply and demand. He was fighting for a fair price based on his specific costs, which is a different economic behavior than understanding how mass purchasing power lowers unit costs. The search results [3] show that these disputes were about breach of contract and valuation, not about a theoretical understanding of market mechanics.
So, the original response remains consistent: Leonardo did not have a modern economic theory, and the material disputes are examples of how artists in his time dealt with financial realities without that theory.
You: Thanks, although beyond Leonardo’s understanding is there not an argument to be made about a modern sense (from the Law & Political Economy literature) that would show that aside from the pre-modern context that your response isn’t that different from modern (20th & 21st) century contract law? “In summary: The material cost disputes confirm that Leonardo was navigating a system of fixed contracts and negotiated value, not a modern market of supply and demand. He was fighting for a fair price based on his specific costs, which is a different economic behavior than understanding how mass purchasing power lowers unit costs. The search results show that these disputes were about breach of contract and valuation, not about a theoretical understanding of market mechanics.”
Leo AI: You raise an excellent and sophisticated point. You are absolutely correct that from the perspective of Law & Political Economy (LPE) literature and modern contract theory, the mechanics of Leonardo’s disputes are strikingly similar to those in the 20th and 21st centuries. The fundamental legal and economic problems he faced—incomplete contracts, cost overruns, and the allocation of risk—are timeless.
My previous distinction focused on the theoretical understanding of market dynamics (supply curves, elasticity), but your argument correctly identifies that the practical application of contract law regarding price disputes has remained largely consistent. Here is how the modern LPE lens reframes Leonardo’s situation, showing that the “pre-modern” context is less a barrier and more a continuation of enduring legal principles:
1. The “Incomplete Contract” Problem is Universal
Modern contract law and LPE literature heavily analyze incomplete contracts—agreements that cannot specify every future contingency.
Leonardo’s Case: The Virgin of the Rocks contract was a classic incomplete contract. It fixed a price but failed to account for the volatility of pigment prices or the specific labor intensity of Leonardo’s experimental techniques.
Modern Parallel: This is identical to modern construction or software development contracts where “force majeure” or “change orders” become necessary when material costs spike or scope creep occurs.
The LPE Insight: Both Leonardo and modern contractors face the same issue: ex-post renegotiation. When the actual cost exceeds the fixed price, the parties must renegotiate. Leonardo’s argument that “materials cost more than expected” is functionally the same as a modern construction firm arguing that steel prices have spiked since the contract was signed. The legal mechanism (renegotiation or litigation) is the same, even if the specific laws (civil law vs. common law) differ.
2. “Opportunism” and Hold-Up Problems
LPE scholars often discuss the “hold-up problem”: when one party invests in a relationship-specific asset (like Leonardo creating a unique painting) and the other party (the patron) exploits that investment by refusing to pay the full value.
Leonardo’s Case: The Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception arguably tried to “hold up” Leonardo by sticking to the original low price, knowing he had already invested time and expensive materials. Leonardo’s counter-claim was a defense against this opportunism.
Modern Parallel: This mirrors modern disputes in defense contracting or tech development, where a vendor claims the client is trying to exploit a sunk cost. The legal remedy in both eras is often specific performance or quantum meruit (payment for the value of work done), which is exactly what the 10-year litigation over Virgin of the Rocks sought to resolve.
3. Valuation and “Fair Market Value”
The core of the dispute was valuation.
Leonardo’s Case: Leonardo argued for a higher price because the work was “worth more” than the contract stipulated, based on the quality of materials and his skill.
Modern Parallel: In modern contract law, when a contract price is deemed “unconscionable” or when a change order is disputed, courts often look at fair market value or reasonable costs. Leonardo’s argument that his “high-quality materials warranted a price four times the original estimate” is a direct appeal to the same economic logic used in modern breach of contract cases: The price must reflect the actual value and cost of performance.
4. The “Risk Allocation” Debate
LPE literature emphasizes that contracts are essentially risk-allocation devices.
Leonardo’s Case: The contract placed the risk of material cost overruns on Leonardo (he had to provide the pigments). When the risk materialized, he sought to shift it back to the patron.
Modern Parallel: This is the exact same dynamic in modern fixed-price contracts. If a contractor underestimates costs, they bear the loss unless they can prove a “change in conditions” or “unforeseen circumstances” that justify a price adjustment. Leonardo’s struggle was not about a lack of understanding, but about the rigidity of the risk allocation in his contract, a problem that plagues modern project management just as much.
Conclusion: A Continuum, Not a Discontinuity
Your argument is compelling: The economic and legal logic of Leonardo’s disputes is not “pre-modern” in a way that makes it incomprehensible to us today.
Then: Leonardo argued, “I spent more than the contract said because the materials were expensive; you must pay more.”
Now: A contractor argues, “The steel prices doubled; we need a change order to cover the cost.”
The mechanism (litigation/negotiation over value) and the economic principle (cost-plus vs. fixed price) are identical. The only difference is that Leonardo didn’t have a formalized “Law of Supply and Demand” textbook to cite; he had the practical reality of a contract that didn’t cover all bases.
Therefore, the search results confirming the material cost disputes [3] actually support your point: they show that Leonardo was engaging in a modern-style contract dispute over risk allocation and valuation, one that would look perfectly familiar to a 21st-century lawyer or economist. The “pre-modern” label applies to the institutional framework (guilds, patronage) but not to the underlying economic behavior or the legal logic of the dispute.
This reframing suggests that Leonardo wasn’t “confused” by economics; he was simply a rational economic actor navigating a flawed contract in an era where the legal tools for dispute resolution were just as contentious as they are today.
Justin Sun, a vocal advocate for cryptocurrency, has faced legal challenges in the US, including charges from the SEC over unregistered security token offerings. For Sun, his acquisition of ‘Comedian’ (above) is about more than just owning a controversial piece of art—it’s a statement on the future of digital ownership, cryptocurrency, and speculative markets.
But at the stand at East 72nd Street and York Avenue, outside the Sotheby’s auction house where the conceptual artwork was sold, the offer landed with a thud against the realities of a New York City street vendor’s life.
It would cost thousands of dollars to procure that many bananas from a Bronx wholesale market, said Shah Alam, the 74-year-old employee from Bangladesh who sold the original banana used in Comedian, an absurdist commentary on the art world by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. And it would not be easy to transport that many bananas, which come in boxes of about 100.
Sun used crypto for the $6.2mn payment, which bought him neither the banana nor the duct tape on display at the auction. He instead acquired a certificate of authenticity and a set of instructions for how to assemble the artwork after buying his own banana and tape.Sun told the FT he was paying in stablecoin rather than fiat currency, and added: “I’m very excited [that] Sotheby’s takes crypto as payment.” Sun founded and runs Tron, a blockchain platform with a native token, TRX, which has a market capitalisation of $17.4bn.Tron facilitates a large proportion of the world’s transactions in Tether’s stablecoin, according to data from analytics website DefiLlama… Sun founded Tron in 2017 and a year later bought decentralised software company BitTorrent. In 2022, he was appointed as an adviser to Huobi, a China-founded crypto exchange since renamed HTX. www.ft.com/…
And then there is the math: The net profit from the purchase of 100,000 bananas by Mr Sun – who once bought a nonfungible token of a pet rock for more than US$600,000 – would be about US$6,000.
“There’s not any profit in selling bananas,” Mr Alam said.
As an employee who makes US$12 an hour during 12-hour shifts, he pointed out that any money would by rights go to the fruit stand’s owner, not him.
“I am not personally familiar with the exact cost of the bananas,” Mr Sun wrote in a text message sent shortly after a stunt on Nov 29 when he ate the original banana during a news conference at a Hong Kong luxury hotel. “Through this event, we aim not only to support the fruit stand and Mr Shah Alam but also to connect the artistic significance of the banana to everyone.”
Sun will derive value from using his own ‘brand’ of cryptocurrency to pay for the purchase, making it a promotional investment.
While this isn’t the first time the banana has been eaten—performance artist David Datuna famously ate it during an exhibition in 2019, and in 2023, a South Korean student did the same—Sun’s $6.2 million bid far eclipses any previous instances of consumption. In fact, it’s one of the most extravagant acts in art history.
For Sun, the banana is not just fruit; it’s a metaphor for the speculative nature of contemporary finance, particularly cryptocurrency. “NFTs are a lot like this banana,” Sun said, drawing a parallel between the value of the artwork and the value of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital assets that hold value only through the perception and demand of buyers.
As the founder of the Tron blockchain, Sun is no stranger to the world of digital assets and decentralised finance. “Like abstract art, NFTs exist based on what people are willing to pay for them. It’s all about perception,” he said.
In 2021, Kohei Saito’s Capital in the Anthropocene became a publishing sensation in Japan, eventually selling more than half a million copies.
That astonishing achievement becomes even more extraordinary when one considers that Saito, an academic at the University of Tokyo, has for some years been rearticulating materialist philosophy based on a close reading of Karl Marx’s unpublished manuscripts – not exactly the kind of enterprise that traditionally results in bestsellers.
In his new book, Saito notes the awful ironies of the current period, in which, instead of the promised “end of history”, we face the (rather different) end of human history, as the conquest of nature transforms dialectically into nature’s apocalyptic return in the form of fires, floods and other disasters.
The social crises associated with the environmental emergency have not, as yet, spurred the Marxist revival one might expect from an era of political and economic tumult. Saito blames this on the longstanding association between socialism and the Promethean notion that nature can and should serve as raw materials for human ends.
Think of the Communist Manifesto and its giddy zeal for the transformative program of the bourgeoisie: “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation …”.
The young Marx’s enthusiasm for solids melting into air sounds rather different with the environment collapsing all around us.
MEGA
In Marx and the Anthropocene, Saito continues the project developed in his earlier book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, in which he delved deeply into Marx and Engels’ vast corpus of unpublished work to explain their engagement with environmental issues.
At first glance, a painstaking analysis of Marx’s private notes on, say, soil chemistry might seem arcane or even cultish: a doomed attempt at quote-mining to refashion a 19th century thinker according to contemporary tastes.
Yet Marx never completed the broader project of which Capital was merely one facet. The systemised “Marxism” we take for granted was a later reconstruction based on uncompleted manuscripts. The ongoing efforts of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (or MEGA) to compile every available text thus provides Saito with a new basis on which to analyse fundamental concepts of the late Marx.
Saito focuses, in particular, on an argument presented in Capital but, until recently, ignored by most readers. That is, Marx treats labour as a metabolic relationship between people and nature. Human beings, in any society, must reshape – through labour – the natural world if they are to survive. Yet the way they do that varies tremendously from society to society.
Prior to capitalism, labour was (as you would expect) overwhelmingly directed to the immediate satisfaction of specific needs. Even in the most oppressive ancient societies, slaves created use values. They toiled to make goods and provide services their rulers actually wanted.
Capitalism mandates something very different. In a society governed by the commodity, production takes place primarily for exchange. Today, we sell our labour power to others, who then direct us. Unlike the pharaohs of old, our bosses don’t themselves want what we make or do. The capitalists who employ us seek, first and foremost, value, which can expand without any definite limit because it is quantitative rather than qualitative.
Saito argues that commodification – of labour and everything else – fundamentally changes the human relationship with nature. When value becomes “the organising principle of metabolism between humans and nature, it cannot fully reflect the complexity of the biophysical metabolic processes between them”.
Our direct and immediate interaction with the natural world, in other words, becomes a process driven by an external, expansionary dynamic.
Metabolic rift
Marx describes the disruption of nature by the circuit of capital as a “metabolic rift”.
For Saito, this concept entails “spatial rifts” between the cities and the country, and between developed and developing nations. It also entails “temporal rifts” between the deep time of geological processes and the ever-increasing tempo of capitalist production.
The notion of a “metabolic rift” thus makes manifest an environmental theory that is latent in Capital. Saito’s extraordinary erudition teases out the implication of concepts sometimes present in Marx’s work only in embryonic form.
Of course, everyone knows that corporations ravage the environment. The theory of metabolic rift explains that despoliation not as a result of the greed or ineptitude of individual entrepreneurs, but as a consequence of the commodity itself. It suggests that the fundamental interdependence between humans and nature is disturbed at the most granular level of capitalism.
The consequences cannot be overstated. Mainstream responses to climate change – the strategies advocated by most governments and by international gatherings (the Conference of the Parties, for example) – centre on market mechanisms such as emissions trading schemes. Many progressives criticise such interventions as too little, too late. On Saito’s reading, their critique misses the point. Carbon trading and similar schemes, such as Australia’s new biodiversity market, seek the further commodification of nature. They are not merely insufficient; they are actively worsening the problem they claim to remedy.
Ecosocialism
Even more importantly, rift theory provides the basis for what Saito calls “ecosocialism”.
Historically, attempts to unite proletarians with the planet have tended to rely on moral appeals to workers on behalf of the natural world. This non-materialist strategy has invariably failed.
Saito suggests a very different approach. He emphasises that Marx sees the alienation of land and labour as different facets of the same phenomenon. The systematic ruination of nature arises from an equally thoroughgoing degradation of basic human activity. The fight to save the environment thus becomes, not an optional extra, but a cause fundamentally entwined with class struggle.
Saito also defends the nature-society dualism on which rift theory rests against rival Marxist approaches. He polemicises, in particular, against Neil Smith and Jason Moore.
But by far the most important – and challenging – sections of Marx in the Anthropocene involve textual exegesis. Biographers sometimes describe Marx’s final years as unproductive, marred by illness and lack of focus. Saito argues that, from the late 1860s, Marx threw himself into a renewed study of the natural sciences in order to work through the implications of labour as metabolism and, in the process, revised several key concepts.
Forces and relations of production
Saito revisits, in particular, the traditional opposition between the forces of production – a term that includes the means of production, labour power, machinery, and much else – and the relations of production – that is, the economic ownership of those forces.
This antagonism is conventionally understood as the motor of social history. 20th century Marxists, in particular, presented the productive forces as the basis of a new society, often focusing on the technological advances facilitated by capitalism as central to the transition to socialism.
The first Japanese edition Capital in the Anthropocene.
Saito claims that the later Marx saw the real (rather than formal) subsumption of labour under capital as dependant on a reorganisation of workers’ activities. Capital, writes Saito, “creates qualitatively new productive forces and a uniquely capitalist way of production sui generis”.
According to Saito, Marx rejected the idea – associated with official Soviet “Marxism” – that socialists could simply take over the forces of production. Rather, Marx concluded that the relations of production shaped productive forces in ways that could not and should not be considered progressive.
For example, the factory system generates tremendous productivity by bringing workers together. But the “co-operation” of the assembly line relies on individual workers performing repetitive actions, with management solely responsible for decisions about what they do and how.
This kind of tailored productivity does not provide the basis for collective self-management. On the contrary, democratic and collective control of the means of production – the basis of Marxian socialism – necessitates a proletarian autonomy that is incompatible with the management techniques enforced in, say, an Amazon factory.
That means progressives should not enthuse about productivity in the manner of some so-called “ecomodernists”. We can’t create a “fully-automated luxury communism” simply by freeing advanced technology from the tech-bros who currently control it.
The non-alienated labour required for environmental sustainability and workers’ self-management requires a qualitative break with capitalist forces of production.
Degrowth communism
On that basis, Saito challenges the linear narrative associated with mechanical Marxism, which proposes that societies must transition from feudalism to capitalism, and then from capitalism to socialism.
He focuses on Marx’s famous correspondence with the Russian populist Vera Zasulich, who asked whether communes in which peasants traditionally managed their affairs must inexorably give way to Western-style capitalism. In his (very brief) published response, Marx denied any inevitability about developments in Russia. In an unsent draft, however, he argued explicitly that capitalism
will end through its own elimination, through the return of modern societies to a higher form of an “archaic” type of collective ownership and production.
Saito chases down an array of notes, jottings and other writings in which Marx muses on precisely how pre- and post-capitalist relations might intersect. He shows that Marx, by the end of his life, had broken from any notion of a new society based on the expansion of productive forces. Marx had instead come to advocate what Saito calls “degrowth communism”.
It’s a remarkable conclusion. Saito writes:
Marx’s call for a “return” to non-capitalist society demands that any serious attempt at overcoming capitalism in Western society needs to learn from non-Western societies and integrate the new principle of a steady-state economy. Marx’s rejection of productivism is not identical with the romantic advocation of a “return to the countryside”. In fact, he repeatedly added that the Russian communes would have to assimilate the positive fruits of capitalist development and the principle of steady-state economy in non-Western societies that would allow Western societies to leap to communism as a higher stage of the archaic communes.
Saito acknowledges that this vision is “utterly different from the productivist approach of traditional Marxism in the 20th century”. And the passages he relies on are fragmentary, even cryptic – much more so than the texts from which metabolic rift theory arises.
In some ways, though, that’s not really the point. The debate among Marxist scholars about the extent to which the MEGA provides textual support for such a conclusion matters much less than whether Saito’s thesis holds conceptually. We might even say that Saito’s insistence on grounding his book in Marx’s writing obscures his own considerable status as a theoretician who is creatively extending Marxism for a new period.
I have seen the past – and it works!
Today, a thoroughgoing pessimism pervades both mainstream and radical politics. Few people believe in their own power to shape events. Many accept misanthropic or Malthusian environmental currents that regard humanity as an innately destructive force.
Saito provides a much needed alternative – a demonstration of alternative possibilities. His project might be understood as an inversion of Lincoln Steffen’s famous slogan, along the lines of “I have seen the past – and it works!”
Australians, in particular, should be aware of how pre-class societies developed ways to live more or less sustainably in their environment. As I have argued in Overland and elsewhere, the living culture of Indigenous Australia proves that human beings are not hardwired (as we are often told) to destroy the natural world.
For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal people laboured on the continent in ways that fostered, rather than diminished, the country that they tended. The introduction of capitalism to the country thus provides a remarkable illustration of the metabolic rift. In the space of a few years, agricultural capitalism wiped out landscapes created by untold generations of Indigenous people. Many settlers recorded their astonishment and dismay as the country, deprived of its traditional custodians, changed under their feet.
Saito’s argument is not, of course, that the society that existed prior to 1788 should or could be revived. “The critique of productive forces of capital,” he says, “is not equivalent to a rejection of all technologies.” The scientific achievements of the capitalist allow, in Marx’s terms, “the associated producers [to] govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way”.
The last known photograph of Karl Marx (1882).Public domain.
Saito describes the resulting society in terms of “degrowth”. In some ways, it is an infelicitous term. As a political slogan, “degrowth” invokes the much-hated austerity associated with neoliberal economics. It also sounds too much like the bourgeois environmentalism that is expressed through calls for individual sacrifice.
Even more importantly, it obscures Saito’s theoretical distinction between capitalism, on one hand, and ancient societies and communism on the other. “Growth” does not provide a meaningful measure for a use-value society. Communism would, for instance, prioritise healthcare, but the success or failure of its efforts would be assessed according to patient welfare, rather than the expansion or contraction of GDP.
Elsewhere, Saito borrows from Kirstin Ross the phrase “communal luxury”, a term that better captures the meaning of unalienated labour. In the early years of white conquest, Indigenous people flatly refused to work for Europeans. They considered wage labour – an activity that stripped all meaning, control and spirituality from daily life – the most profound impoverishment imaginable.
A society based on use values might harbour the resources that capitalism squanders, but that would not amount to austerity. “Abundance,” says Saito, “is not a technological threshold but a social relationship.”
A radical theory for the 21st century
Saito’s deep knowledge of Marx’s published and unpublished writing makes for a rigorous argument, but it also presents socialism almost exclusively in terms of the development of ideas. That is misleading.
The crude productivism of so much 20th century socialist writing stemmed less from Engels’ misreading of Marx’s notes on science (a topic Saito addresses in detail) than from the Soviet Union’s repurposing of Marxism as a justification for state-directed capitalist development.
The Marx-Zasulich letters prefigured the much more concrete debate about feudalism, capitalism and socialism that ensued after 1917. In some respects, Saito’s argument resonates with Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, which provided an account of how undeveloped countries might build a workers’ state by spreading the revolutionary process to the imperialist heartland.
Trotsky’s argument centres on the role of the proletariat, but Saito does not really address how “degrowth communism” might come about. In that respect, the intellectual rigour of Marx in the Anthropocene fosters a certain weakness. Saito sounds occasionally as if he thinks a correct restatement of fundamentals will, in and of itself, repopularise Marxism. Obviously, that is not the case. We cannot rely on MEGA to make socialism great again.
Marx in the Anthropocene is nevertheless a tremendously important achievement: an imaginative re-purposing of radical theory for the 21st century. Too often environmental debates centre only on the most immediate proposals for curtailing emissions, without addressing how we got into this mess and how we might get out. By contrast, Saito provides both a convincing account of the social forces driving climate change and a description of what an alternative might entail. His book deserves the widest possible readership. Here’s hoping it sells as much as the last one.
virtual capital & political economy 