Material politics

Finally, do plastics drive history I take up this methodological question in the concluding section in order to link my findings to the overall issue of the book the material politics of plastic. 

Hitler s Four-Year Plan memorandum specifically mentioned synthetic rubber, synthetic fuel, synthetic fat and light metals. Yet thermoplastics also had a role in the material politics of National Socialism. It was often heard that, in the case of mobilization, we have to secure also the raw substances and additives, all available in Germany, for plastics like polyvinyl chloride or polystyrol . This remained true even though thermoplastics share of LG. Farben s overall investments in R D and general plant construction declined after 1940 and never competed with two of the most ambitious ersatz programmes of both the state and the LG. Farben corporation, synthetic (air) fuel and synthetic rubber (Birkenfeld 1964 Lorentz and Erker 2003 Plumpe 1990 338 Tooze 2006 449). Exact numbers are hard to come... 

In order to take up these multiple and different ways in which plastics are accumulating across environments and bodies, I mobilize a notion of material politics that attends to how plastics are entangled with and generative of specific forms of more-than-human work. The notion of work is important for this investigation because it allows for an approach to plastics that accounts... 

In his metabolic theory of labour and value, Marx excluded the non-human from his definition of human labour. For Marx, labour was an expression of man s metabolic relation with and conversion of nature . Yet this labour is notable not just for its assumed conversion of nature into resource, but also for what it is not. Non-human work does not constitute labour, Marx argues, since nature s work whether the web of the spider or the hive of the bee -has not undergone a prior mental conception that would, for instance, characterize the labour of an architect conceptualizing a building (Marx 1990 283 84). The exclusion of non-human work from theories of labour informs the types of material politics that are possible, since non-humans may not then be recognized as participants in our material lives. 

Takada, H. (2013) International Pellet Watch Studies of the Magnitude and Spatial Variation of Chemical Risks Associated with Environmental Plastics , in J. Gabrys, G. Hawkins and M. Michael (eds) Accumulation The Material Politics of Plastic, London Routledge. 

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