Nature's Alienation

The story of 19th century Chicago and the Midwest is the story of Capitalism

Alienation is probably one of the most famous concepts popularized by Karl Marx. If you take any humanities undergrad to the side and ask them to rattle off what they know about Marx, they’d probably vaguely riff on Marx’s postulation of the increasing separation of workers from their labor by the two-pronged attack of the machine and the division of labor. While technically correct, this particular example of alienation sails over its sweeping applicability to the world around us. Understanding not just the example, but the logic of alienation is the key to understanding both Marx’s political project and Capitalism.

Nowhere is the concept of alienation better exemplified than in the story of the rise of Chicago and the American Midwest. This story, spanning the early to late-19th century, is impeccably documented in William Cronon’s classic Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. While not a Marxist himself, Cronon brilliantly illustrates how Chicago’s rise to eminence was a product of alienation from physical geography as borne out by market relations.

This alienation takes the form of separation from the physical landscape through advances in transportation and encroachment of market logic. Cronon deploys a materialist method of investigation that avoids the pitfall of mechanic, vulgar determinism that has beguiled so many Marxists over the centuries; Cronon’s materialism, which is more in line with Marx’s method, is one that doesn’t frame the relationship between humans and nature as a one-sided exploiter-exploited relationship — but instead as a co-evolutionary process where both act upon and respond to each other. By understanding this process, one may achieve a far clearer understanding of the logic of Capital. 

It’s important first to touch on what alienation is. Alienation is above all separation and takes many forms. The average 21st-century worker today is alienated from the land in a way the average 19th-century midwestern small farmer was not. In contrast to the farmer, the worker cannot grow his own food and relies solely on selling his labor-power for wages to survive.

Alienation, while present in some form or another throughout human history, becomes particularly acute under capital’s development. The early story of Chicago and the Midwest is a sterling example of this phenomenon. The mid-1830s was a time of intense land speculation, with Chicago at its very center. Land speculators made their living off of buying parcels of land for cheap and selling them dear. The act of land speculation itself is a process of alienation. Land was parceled off into small plots of squares to make buying and selling easier.¹ While neat, the system was completely alienated from the physical landscape. Despite many of these parcels of land not being developed and “[bearing] no relation to economic reality,” they nonetheless fetched dizzying prices on the market.² News of the Erie Canal’s opening unleashed an electric storm of speculation as speculators bought parcels for hundreds of dollars and sold them for thousands. Boosters and speculators alike breathlessly announced that the canal would augment the “natural advantages” of Chicago to make it the metropolis of the hinterland. These market relations rooted in private property give rise to an important form of alienation: the anticipated, future value of commoditized land disconnected from the actual, physical utility of the land itself.

But financial alienation was only one component of alienation. An even more totalizing example may be found in the relationship between farmers and merchants with the climate. Up until the mid-19th century, Chicago was a city whose business and trade flowed according to the physical limitations of the weather. The flatness of the landscape meant that water was poorly-drained, creating bogs and swamps that trapped farmers’ wagons and carts during the wet summers. The blizzards and storms during the winter made travel over land very difficult. Farmers in the hinterland refrained from travelling frequently “because [they] could carry only small loads in such vehicles, the costs of wagon, horses, and driver consumed a sizable portion of any money they earned.”³ The situation wasn’t much better for merchants. While Chicago sat upon a giant lake, travel to the East ceased during the winter while Lake Michigan froze over. Trade and commerce therefore was forced to respect physical geography and climate.

The railroad changed all this. No longer did commerce have to flow with the rhythm of nature. The explosion of railroads during the 1850s and 1860s operated meant business could operate almost independently of the weather. Neither mud nor ice could stop trains from hauling freight. Farmers now hauled their goods to Chicago year-round regardless of boggy summers and cold snowstorms. Merchants, too, could travel by railroad to New York and bypass the iced-over lake. 

Of course, The railroad did not make the market. Private property and proletarianization existed long before it. The railroad was merely a consequence of processes long in development. But the railroad also accelerated these processes and extended the logic of the market, transforming the geography of the Midwest. No longer could the dead of winter or the peak of summer ground commerce to a halt. No longer did merchants and farmers have to march according to nature’s drum.

The railroad revolution was so profound that it changed how humans experienced time. The railroad cut distance down so much that time itself seemed to warp: while it took 2 weeks to travel to New York in 1830, now it only took 2 days. But the speed of travel was not the sole factor that made the railroad special: it was the form of travel that affected our relationship to the landscape most. As Cronon points out, “Train passengers had less and less need to interact physically with the landscapes through which they were passing.”4

When a farmer travelled to Chicago pre-railroad, he had to constantly mind the physical landscape. Whenever a cartwheel got caught in a mudhole, he had to get up and get it out; at sundown he had to stop and find lodging; travel had to cease for lunch and feed the horses. But with the railroad, all one had to do was sit down and watch the world fly past through the window. The railroad not only liberated commerce from the capricious will of the climate, but also alienated people from the physical environment. Cronon writes “Railroad and telegraph systems would expand in tandem, often following the same routes, and together they shrank the whole perceptual universe of North America. Because people experience distance more in hours than in miles, New York, Chicago, and the Great West quite literally grew closer as the lines of wire and rail proliferated among them.”5 

Parallel to this was the revolution the railroad brought to the hinterland. The west of Chicago consisted of thousands of square miles of prairies: land ripe for wheat farming. But the absence of trees and therefore lumber for cabins and firewood limited the farmer to the prairie’s edge. The dependence on wagons also meant that farmers had to settle where they could “reach the waterways, [because] one of the chief reasons they initially stayed on the margins of the prairies was to keep the trip to the river as short as possible.”⁴ The necessity of minding the physical landscape limited farmers to smaller scale production. 

The railroad changed that. By making supply runs far easier, farmers no longer had to settle near rivers for transport, forests for lumber, and prairies for cultivation —  now they could strike deep into the heart of the prairie, only needing to depend on the railroad for transport and supplies. Now frontier farmers could settle far from the treelines and the rivers, untethered from the concerns of physical geography beyond those directly affecting crop cultivation for the market.

Cronon’s story of speculation and the railroad is useful as an application of Marx’s theories on ecological alienation. Only over the past several decades have scholars rediscovered the ecological dimensions of Marx’s political theory. John Bellamy Foster in his Marx’s Ecology argues convincingly that it is incorrect to interpret Marx’s comment in the Communist Manifesto on the towns rescuing the masses from the “idiocy of rural life” as an anti-ecological position. On the contrary, “[Marx and Engels] had observed that the division between town and country was ‘the most important division of material and mental labor’: a form of ‘subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, another into a restricted country-animal.”⁵

While the 19th century London proletarian was immersed in cosmopolitan culture, he was denied clean air, space, and the physical means of life; conversely, the peasant had access to clean air and nature, but was cut off from the world. One was worldlier but sicker, the other was healthier but isolated. The logic of Capital drives this alienation between sites of consumption (workers in the cities) and sites of production (farmers in the country.) 

While according to Cronon the “city and country were growing closer together,” feelings of alienation penetrated the hinterland. Small farmers felt this alienation in their dealings with the middle-men: railroads that charged high rates for their freight and wholesalers who offered the lowest prices for their crops. Mothers across rural Illinois fretted over children leaving the farm for better wages in the cities. Being squeezed from one side by alien forces personified by middle-men and squeezed from the other side by communal precarity, farmers blamed the city: they saw Chicago as a “magnet for sin”⁶ that attracted their youth and a magnet for wealth as more and more of their profits were sucked away by the middle men. These real economic hardships united small farmers and agricultural proletarians across the West as cooperatives formed and the Populist party arose to challenge the “Money Power.”

Whether or not these farmers underplayed the mutuality between city (for badly needed credit and supplies) and country (for food) misses the more important point: farmers across the midwest felt an increasing alienation. It permeated their consciousness. They perceived themselves as the producers and the city the consumer. Farmers saw Chicago as a metropole whose citizens quite literally ate their lunch.

This collective is articulated most clearly in William Jennings Bryan’s thunderous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech that swept him to become the Democratic nominee for the 1896 Presidential election: “I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”⁷ Though the Populists were far from Marxists, many of them probably would have agreed with Marx’s assertion that the logic of Capital at once binds the city and the country closer together but also deepens the divide between the two, producing a relationship that sometimes borders on parasitic. 

This alienation that haunted the populists — that of the deepening division between sites of production and sites of consumption — is a product of a separation from nature that Marx says produces a “robbery of the soil” by Capital.⁸ As Cronon writes, the railroads “drew every local ecosystem into the web of [Chicago’s] markets, so the environmental dynamics of western places eventually had as much to do with their hinterland status as with their ecology.”⁹ Prairie animals like bison and Minnesota pine trees, ecological factors crucial to their respective ecosystems, were now commodities: their high numbers produced such low prices that people consumed without abandon, leading to their disappearance across the landscape. Efficient means of transportation expanded the market and at once allowed settlers to live further beyond the hinterland irrespective of local natural resources, while at the same time generating heavier demands on far-away ecosystems in order to support those settlers.

This avarice is not merely a product of human nature, but of the alienation wrought by capitalist market relations. The market itself is a site of alienation. It is where sellers come to meet buyers, both needing something the other has. Prairie farmers hundreds of miles from the woods depended on Minnesota lumbermen for timber; while lumbermen hundreds of miles away from wheat fields depended on farmers for food. The former intensely planted wheat and depleted the soil while the latter furiously cut down trees and exhausted the plentiful Minnesota North Woods.

These farmers and lumbermen did not cultivate tons of grain or cut down thousands of trees for personal use: there’s only so much grain one can eat and so much firewood one needs before more is unnecessary. These groups instead labored to sell on the market. This relationship between farmers and lumbermen, so catastrophic for their respective ecosystems, was mediated by an alienated market upon which both depended on for their survival. The market not only intensifies the division and separation between the site of production as embodied in the country and consumption as embodied in the city; but also divides those sites of production into a dizzying kaleidoscope of more specialized sites of production where workers progressively do not produce for their own consumption but for Market, upon whom eventually all depend for their livelihood. 

Cronon’s story is not just the story of Chicago — it’s a story about us. There is nothing fundamentally different about today versus mid-19th century Illinois. All that’s changed is the degree of alienation brought about by the totalization of the market. In economist Karl Polanyi’s words, “instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”¹⁰

The modern grocery store is illustrative of how alienated consumption now is from production. While the mid-19th century frontier grocer offered perhaps twenty kinds of products, Walmart offers thousands. The grocery store is an incredible human achievement. It unites the labor of millions of worker-producers with the demands of millions of buyers. The production and logistics necessary to make it all work are unmatched in human history.

And yet, as incredible as the cornucopia is, the abundance obscures the relationship between producer and consumer. The food aisle is a cornucopia seemingly sprung forth from the void. The advertising on a package of Great Value thick-cut bacon does not advertise the millions of hours of labor put into the construction of warehouses, maintenance of machinery, and slaughtering of pigs that made its existence possible. The labor that made it all possible is almost invisible in the sphere of consumption. While “Iowa farmers perusing the grocery section of the Sears [direct mail-order] catalog might not forget that Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Flour or Queen Mary Scotch Oatmeal had originally come from farms like their own.”¹¹

Most people nowadays no longer work as farmers. While 50% of the 1950 American workforce was employed in agriculture, that number has dwindled down to 10% in 2020.¹² Because most Americans no longer grow their own food or even grow up near farms, the alienation between the site of production and consumption is even more profound than in mid to late-19th century Chicago. This alienation is not different in kind but in degree. The modern day grocery or department store, whose thousands of products seem to spring forth from non-existence , are logical extensions of the Montgomery Ward and Sears direct mail-order catalogs of the late-19th century. What has changed is the intensity of alienation as a result of the expanding domain of Capital.

This deepening alienation has disastrous consequences for the earth. At the same time as Chicago was prying open the hinterland for capitalist farming with the railroad, German agricultural chemists like Justus von Liebig brought attention to the loss of soil nutrients in Britain due to “capitalist agriculture.” Marx was not being metaphorical when he accused capital of robbing the earth. “Food and fiber, containing the elementary constituents of the soil, were being shipped long distances in a one-way [emphasis mine] movement from country to city, leading to the loss to the soil of its nutrients, which later had to be replaced by natural (later synthetic) fertilizers.”¹³ This relationship of extraction, something small farmers of the Grange and later Populist movement felt so intimately, is a result of the alienation borne out by capitalist production.

If there is one criticism I have of Cronon’s book, it’s that he misunderstands Marx’s political project. Cronon writes that “Some portion of… value, as Marx surely would have argued, was ‘produced’ by the human labor that had transformed prairies into wheat, forests into lumber, and livestock into meat.”¹⁴ He goes on to chide Marx, saying that the labor theory of value “cannot by itself” explain the accumulation of capital at the foundation of Chicago’s skyrocketing growth, and that Marx thus neglects nature’s role in providing the materials for that growth.

Ironically, Marx would have wholeheartedly agreed. “Labor,” writes Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, “is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.”¹⁵ Cronon thus underestimates the ecological dimension of Marx’s political project. Which, to give him credit, is not entirely his fault: it has only been recently that the ecological component of Marx’s writing has been rediscovered. But nonetheless, alienation for Marx was important not just for its implications for labor, but also for the environment. 

Environmental destruction for the sake of profit is an explicit theme of Nature’s Metropolis. Capitalist production not only destroys the basis of its wealth, but does so in a wasteful manner. As the capitalist farmer puts more pressure on the soil for more yield, he depletes the soil and destroys the basis of his wealth. And all this pressure despite 30-40 percent of our food supply going to waste every year.¹⁶ This waste of resources is profoundly irrational when there are millions across the nation and the world suffering from food insecurity.

But hope is not lost. As Marx writes, “Capitalist production… only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”¹⁷ This should not be a call for developing the productive forces at the expense of nature or people: this stagist, mechanical understanding of Marx was the fatal mistake of the post-Lenin Soviet Union. Nor does it mean going back to a Rousseau-esque “pristine, untouched” nature that certainly never existed: native americans — whether Iriquois or Sioux — modified and engineered the physical environment just as much as European peasant farmers. What it means is refounding our relationship to nature.

Broadly speaking, the difference between pre-capitalist and capitalist societies is that the former considers itself as evolving with and being a part of nature; the latter group, on the other hand, views itself as evolving against and being above nature. Commerce before the railroad had no choice but to shut down business during winter while the lake froze over and the winter storms made land travel dangerous. But the railroad liberated farmers and merchants from nature: now commerce could continue year-round, irrespective of the weather outside. The logic of Capitalism alienates us from nature and compels us to rob it even while we know that what we are doing will spell our destruction in the long-term.

Cronon does not end his book with a call to action. He ends it with a reflection on his childhood spent between the Illinois countryside and Chicago. While the concluding chapter is stirring, we should not think that romanticism is sufficient for addressing the present crisis. The metabolic rift, a product of the alienation between production and consumption as borne out by the logic of Capital, is transforming the climate for the worse. Little has to be said for the increasing volatility of the seasons and the growing intensity of natural disasters as proof of this. It is not only right but also necessary for us to repair our relationship to the earth to avoid planetary disaster. 

Fortunately, Marx offers a possible roadmap for how we may address the ecological crisis. In the Communist Manifesto, one of Marx’s calls to action is to “[abolish] the distinction between town and country.”¹⁸ What does this mean? The only solution to alienation is synthesis.

When Marx calls to abolish the division between country and city, he means a more even dispersal of the population across the country. Society being so sharply divided between the many in the city and the few in the country is a recent historical phenomenon and is the product of a very complex historical process of expropriating and dispossessing peasants of the land and the commons, emptying out the countryside and filling up the cities. Technological advancement has only accelerated this legal, political, and economic process, as fewer and fewer people are needed to produce larger yields of produce. As the mothers in rural 19th-century Illinois can attest, the country’s purpose is now as a site of physical extraction in the form of agricultural production as well as labor extraction in the form of sons and daughters who follow where the well-paying jobs are.

It’s neither the mother nor the son’s fault; nor the fault of the farmer who turns the prairies into wheat or the lumberman who turns the woods into timber. We are all subject to the whims of the Capital’s tyranny over nature, a rule that is at once impersonal and abstract but whose consequences are all the more personal and concrete. 

But there’s a flip side to this. While Capitalism produces an ever-widening alienation between consumption and production, it also “creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis.”¹⁹ This means transcending the privatization and competition brought about by private property, and moving towards a commons where all may collectively decide on what must be produced and for whose need. It means moving from a mode of production whose end is profit and towards another whose end is use-value: to produce not for profit, but for what is needed. It’s a call for a society where none of us, whether the Amazon warehouse worker or Jeff Bezos himself, lay prostrate before the autocracy of the abstract and impersonal Market — it means democratic control not just of the firm, but of the economy itself.

Cronon’s history of Chicago’s rise and the ways in which market logic alienates us from nature is excellent, and one which I would recommend to anyone who wishes to better understand political economy. I recommend reading it alongside The Robbery of Nature by John Bellamy Foster or, even better, Marx’s Capital. Cronon and Marx complement each other exceptionally well, with both emphasizing the contradiction between how much we rely on nature and yet how divorced we are from it as a result of market relations. Cronon and Marx both state rightfully that Capitalism is a declaration of war against nature. But while the former offers little in the way of a solution, the latter does. This does not make Cronon’s analysis useless, just incomplete. But Marx’s framework complements and completes Cronon’s story. We cannot live against nature. Nor can we live outside nature. Rather, we must live with nature. And that requires a radical transformation in our social relations.

1. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic, 172.

2. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 29.

3. Cronon, 59.

4. Cronon, 103.

5. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 136.

6. Cronon, 357.

7.  http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/

8. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, 637-638.

9. Cronon, 265.

10. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 60.

11. Cronon, 339.

12. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/#:~:text=Agriculture%20and%20its%20related%20industries,percent%20of%20total%20U.S.%20employment.

13. https://monthlyreview.org/2013/12/01/marx-rift-universal-metabolism-nature/#en53

14. Cronon, 149.

15. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1.

16. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs#:~:text=How%20much%20food%20waste%20is,percent%20of%20the%20food%20supply

17. Marx, 638.

18. Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, 175.

19. Marx, Capital Volume 1, 637.