Concerns over foreign bees in the UK reflect the urgent global necessity of the bee as worker. Bees have acquired a reputation as “model ‘modern’ industrial workers.” They are hard working, cooperative, attentive to the hive’s division of labor, and acquiescent of their place within it. However, as pollinators, wartime companions, and architects, bees no longer serve as models of human behavior alone. They now perform a variety of jobs vital to national and global economies, as evidenced in food production, national security, and technological innovation. Indeed, the “busy bee,” despite its decline, has become integral to the future of human life, as we know it. The bee worker – as individual and aggregate – has received considerable attention in literature and philosophy. The bee’s productivity, the cooperative and collective properties of bee labor, and the reticular organization of the hive have long been a source of inspiration and admiration. “For so work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom,” wrote Shakespeare. The bee has been idealized as an inspiration and aspiration for human labor, sociality, and politics. Yet, it is only with the projected crisis of colony collapse disorder – its threats to bees and bee products, and to commercial profits and and human diets – that we have come to notice bees as workers. Only recently has the bee’s significance to human life and death become palpable. In this essay, I begin with the bee as worker to ask two related questions: First, what does it mean to think and write from the body of the bee? Second, what does the bee’s body – as a laboring body – tell us about the mutability and adaptability of capitalism’s destructive forces, its mutability and adaptability? The interdependence of bee and human life and death, I contend, may have much to say about the expanding horizons of contemporary capitalism. However, these entanglements demand a different set of analytic tools. One strategy, as I suggest below, includes a (re)turn to Marx and Engels, a (re)reading that turns from historical materialism to the materiality and interrelationality of human-nature exchange.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:44:52 +0000
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