Piero Bevilacqua The episode of the Odyssey that Odysseus shows his dog in the act of meeting, on the outskirts of Ithaca - one of the most popular and poignant pieces of world literature - unwittingly gives us invaluable information on the customs and urban the agricultural practices in ancient Greece. At the entrance of the Argo city «[...] now lying there, forgotten, left the master / manure on a lot of mules and oxen, which at the gates / piled up, because then took him / servants to fertilize the great land of Odysseus. "
Testimony, as old, suggesting a general truth: since men live within sedentary forms of economy within a city, they must manage their waste, they are forced to live with them and use techniques of disposal. As is known, a history of long held the city together and the country. A vicenda millenaria di flussi materiali costanti e quotidiani: la città riceveva i frutti della terra, e costituiva il mercato sicuro della produzione agricola, ma restituiva alla campagna i suoi rifiuti organici, le sue deiezioni umane e animali, le sue acque luride, indispensabili per ridare alla terra la fertilità depauperata dallo sfruttamento agricolo intensivo.
Dunque, la parte più rilevante dei rifiuti delle società preindustriali, le sostanze organiche, non finivano in discarica, ma costituivano parte integrale dell'economia del tempo, componente centrale di un circuito ininterrotto di rigenerazione della fertilità della terra. E tale pratica si inscrive come una delle caratteristiche salienti, ormai del tutto obliata, dei modi di produzione precapitalistici. Sistemi economici, questi ultimi, finora studiati per i rapporti sociali di produzione, più che non per i rapporti materiali di riproduzione organica. Vale a dire per gli aspetti di utilizzo della natura nei circuiti della produzione e del consumo. Questa relazione - lo Stoffwechsel mit der Natur, lo «scambio organico» di cui parlava Marx - che sottostà a ogni forma di economia finora conosciuta, non ha avuto sinora una sistematica rappresentazione storica.
Diversamente da quanto molti immaginano, il processo di industrializzazione, che si propagò nelle varie regioni degli Stati europei a partire dal XVIII secolo, non inaugurated the culture once and for all use of materials. In contrast, for a period not short, the development industry is above all a new opportunity for the reuse of organic wastes. The city was returning to the campaign to provide new materials. The panels made by pressing oil seeds, waste processing beer, beet, waste from slaughterhouses, distilleries (potatoes, barley, etc.), and many other waste are widely re-use in animal or in form of manure for fertilization of agricultural soils. Even the Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a culture prone to enthusiastically by consumers, repaired, reused, and so retained away. " Indeed, we know that only very slowly in American industry has penetrated the idea and the concrete planning of programmed death of consumer goods. It was sparsely present in some single observer already in the nineteenth century and then in the twenties of the twentieth century. But Planned obsolescence, the planned obsolescence of goods - as was pointed out recently - was first conceived in the desperate year of 1932. In full, then, the Great Depression.
Although it has also triumphed in the fifties and in the auto industry here, as a new model, both socially and productively, has spread to the remaining industrial activities and all society.
Therefore, it is true, as we know, that capitalism inaugurated a completely new chapter in the relationship between population and resources as well as the size scale of the economic exploitation of nature. Marx and Engels was well heralded in the Manifesto. And it is also true that at that stage to change not only the total quantity of waste, but also their quality, less and less due to the organic world and growing fruit of the industrial metabolism.
belongs less to the general awareness of the fact that the foundational theories of this new mode of production, from Smith to Ricardo to Marx of Capital (but not without contradictions), have canceled because of the role of nature in the process of producing the goods. Both the political economy that his greatest critic, Karl Marx, the driving force behind it was assigned to work in production and capital (which Marx was "job embedded"), wiping out the central role that you play the physical world .
In fact, today's waste problem stems from an historical process of the economy finally removed from each culture and logic of reproduction of the material sources of wealth. The problem is, character and size of the disruption that creates and poses challenges - come abbiamo visto - un fenomeno alquanto recente. Il capitalismo, sviluppandosi secondo la sua intima logica, ma ubbidendo anche a culture unilaterali e alla protervia tecnologica dei suoi ceti dominanti, è approdato nell'ultimo mezzo secolo a un'economia pressoché disancorata da ogni pratica riproduttiva. E operando tale scelta è entrato in una sfera di immiserimento crescente delle fonti della ricchezza, a dispetto della mirabolante cornucopia di merci e servizi che esso riesce a mettere in campo. Dunque, nell'età dello sviluppo il capitalismo ha finito coll'incarnare una dimensione unilaterale e ristretta di economia, che si esaurisce nelle pratiche della produzione, dello scambio mercantile e del consumo.
La sfera della generazione della materia di cui si compongono le merci, che è la sfera della generazione della vita stessa, la natura, è rimasta esclusa da ogni cura e rappresentazione. Eppure - come ha ricordato uno studioso che ha ripensato con lena radicale il rapporto natura/economia, Hans Immler, all'economia spetta «non solo l'organizzazione della riproduzione sociale, ma anche quella fisica; le moderne società industriali sono caratterizzate da una stupefacente trascuratezza delle loro esigenze riproduttive. Esse dispongono di una economia della produzione altamente sviluppata, ma sono al tempo stesso estremamente limitate nelle loro economie di riproduzione».
Il modo capitalist production, in fact, that pours goods and services to an extent incomparable with respect to all past societies, is limited to playing only two factors of economic life: the capital and labor. Nature remains a land of plunder, for which there is no "economy of reproduction." Thus, a major policy issue planted in the heart of society. The elementary function, so to speak excretory of human life, generate waste, forcing us to find out about the inextricably social nature of our being generated right from the basics.
Our waste will inevitably affect the other, come out of our private sphere, affect the kind of social contract that binds the community. And today? It has increased or decreased the Civil Service? It is not for the writer to reconstruct different institutional forms and types of management task of presiding over a growing social significance as well. What we want to emphasize here is that today the presence of the remains of the giant waves that our metabolism is a matter which requires companies to reconsider the logic of capitalism at the root of our time and the entire social organization that matches. The shape and material culture of the landfill is now, even with brand new symbolic meaning, a destruction of wealth disproportionate so as to appear as itself a threat to present prosperity. And mortgage worrying about the future.
Everyone knows the answer, as practiced by the time the most advanced societies to cope with a phenomenon of such vast proportions. With a tried and tested cultural reflection, capitalist society relies on the solution of the challenges that present themselves to a newfound technology. It is an old story. It is always a technical device that must save us, and which must of course leave intact the balance of power, social hierarchies, dominant cultures and mentalities. But above all, has the task of continuing economic growth, because it produces more and more, we consume more and more, there is always more. So will the contemporary superstition.
In our case, the response to the exponential growth of waste assigned to science and technology has a name. It's called incinerator. Now renamed - to ennoble and bring him back in the outlines of a productivist logic - incinerator. But landfill or incinerator, from the point of view it is argued here, makes a very substantial difference. All these arrangements are perfectly intimate internal economic logic that has abandoned any responsibility reproduction of nature. They are based on the cancellation of the original value, and foundation of every economy, the natural material. The broken doll, smashed the chair, the frullatore fulminato, benché abbiano perso il loro originario valore d'uso, non cessano di essere materia, natura inorganica o organica. Questa natura e il suo valore, oltre che la sua storia, viene del tutto obliata quando essa, nella metamorfosi dell'umano consumo, perde il sostrato superficiale della sua utilità strumentale. Ma sotto di questa esiste, e viene perduta, non solo materia, ma anche l'economia, il lavoro umano, l'energia e gli investimenti necessari per sottrarla alla sua matrice originaria, alle miniere, ai pozzi, alle foreste e portarla allo stato di "materia prima" per la lavorazione.
È uno spreco gigantesco, un monumento incancellabile all'opera di distruzione economic agent is now manifest in the development of capitalism. The collection requires, at all, a new collective responsibility, a social discipline, which bends the logical individual to general purpose irrepressible. And at the same time promotes the formation of a new awareness of our relationship with nature.
Select our waste, in fact, imply recognition of the differing quality of materials and their possible transformation and reuse. This selective take care of our waste requires the approval of their economic value, as well as their natural origin. And at the same time projecting the consumer to their new destination production. Who care waste secondary materials prepared by the contractor reimmetterà the production cycle.
Consumers and producers of goods thereby restoring an ancient circle of co-operation from the farming communities around ten thousand years ago. The men return to be so not merely the heatsinks, but the mediators of the metabolism of nature, the center of a continuous process of transformation, production, consumption and regeneration. To take care of nature, rather than destroy it with a machine, it is more useful, more profitable, cheaper. The same social cooperation, the compact organization of differentiated waste disposal, it is more useful, more convenient and more economical over the life organized. The domain destroys the carefully produced.
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