[Nils Mojem]

The potato as an Anthropocene/Capitalocene object

Not only is the potato one of the world’s most important food crops, it is also a cultural object and tells many stories of the Anthropocene.

Cultivated by the indigenous people of Central and South America some 7000 years ago, the potato of pre-Columbian times tells a story of self-sufficiency and a life in harmony with nature.

Through the violent conquest of the Americas and the „Columbian Exchange“ that began in the 15th century (Nann/Qiang, 2010), the potato reached Europe (initially as a botanical curiosity rather than a useful plant), from where it spread throughout the world. Here, the potato tells a story of imperialism and colonialism, of the „conquest of the world“, an incipient globalisation and, along with it, a story of violent economic relations, exploitation and oppression.

Since the potato is easy to grow – it makes low demands on soil and climate – and its nutritional value is high, the potato can feed many people for little money even on a small area. This is why the potato played an important role in feeding the growing number of workers in the industrial centres during the industrialisation of Europe: „Wherever factories sprang up, the cultivation of potatoes also increased considerably. (Miedaner, 2014:243). In a sense, the potato made possible the unrestrained exploitation of the European workforce in the first place and thus also tells a story of the forcible expulsion of the rural population into the industrial centres and cities, of the rationalisation of the labour process and the accompanying mechanised and capitalist exploitation and oppression of people and nature.
There are many sub-narratives here that are so typical of the Anthropocene: The extraction of energy through the use of fossil fuels in the context of industrialisation, the colonial regimes that made industrialisation in Europe possible in the first place and were based on slavery, racism and overexploitation, or narratives about the rationalisation of all processes of life and work, including the measurement of time and the associated mania for rationality and increased production.

(Keywords: monopolisation of nature, population politics/biopolitics/reproduction, transatlantic triangle/colonialism, urbanisation and rural space, etc.).

With Justus von Liebig’s discovery (1840) that the use of guano as fertiliser in fields had a favourable effect on crop yields (cf. Medianer, 2020:243), a new chapter emerges in the narrative of man and potato (culture/nature?): This is about a renewed efficiency in the human encounter (and exploitation?) with nature. The potato can be seen here as a cultural object, which is the starting point for many narratives about the development of artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides as well as the manipulation of nature up to genome editing.

(Keywords: bioeconomy, agriculture, limits of nature/culture, domination of nature, Transatlantic Triangle (guano), sustainable agriculture, etc.). …)

Finally, the narrative of the potato arrives in the present. The changing/transformed climate, questions about sustainable sources of energy and raw materials, the issue of world food and new forms of biopolitics, neo-colonialism and monopoly capitalism also accumulate here in the potato: who grows what, for whom, where and for what in this neoliberal and globalised world? What new developments are needed to enable a sustainable and future-oriented nutrition of the world’s population? Can the resistant but difficult-to-transport potato (Miedaner, 2014) guarantee food security? What about patents on crops and in what form are the effects of the Capitalocene reflected here? What role does genetic manipulation play for the future and how does it deform the nature/culture relationship characteristic of the Anthropocene?
Which and above all whose needs are at stake with regard to the question plate or tank? (cf. Gottwald/Krätzer, 2014) In the foreground and under which narrative are solutions for what being sought with science and technology?

(Keyword: bioeconomy, patenting of life, world nutrition, green growth).

Here, the potato can also be used to pose the question of the strategy for a desirable future in/with/after the Anthropocene: Is it a matter of engineering nature or a kind of ReEngineering the Social? Will the fields, the potato, the laboratories of the bioeconomy become the scene of a renewed domination of nature for the purpose of the capitalist madness of constant „development“ in order to meet the demand for energy, food and raw materials and to continue to produce, and raw materials and to continually enable capital to permanently accumulate through the oppression of humans and nature, or can the potato be seen as a symbol of nature’s resilience, as a starting point for „gift relationships“ between humans and nature (Adloff/Leggewie, 2014), as a cultural object of subsistence farming and commoning (Bollier/Helfrich, 2015; Federici, 2020)?

Overall, the potato tells a story of the new earth age about the connection and interaction between humans and nature. A story about imperialism, colonialism, industrialisation, exploitation and oppression, capital economy and rationalisation, technical „progress“, the de/coding of life, artificially created nature, resource consumption and the delusion of permanent growth.
Equally, however, the potato can also tell a story of the resistance of nature, of gift relationships, circular economy, regional approaches, self-sufficiency and forms of convivialism.

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