Mainstream economists will no doubt seize on the new book [ht: mfa] by Robert Fogel et al., The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700, as evidence that capitalism (especially capitalist technologies in the areas of food production and health care) saved humanity from being doomed to hunger and disease.
Technology rescued humankind from centuries of physical maladies and malnutrition, Mr. Fogel argues. Before the 19th century, most people were caught in an endless cycle of subsistence farming. A colonial-era farmer, for example, worked about 78 hours during a five-and-a-half-day week. People needed more food to grow and gain strength, but they were unable to produce more food without being stronger.
Another way of looking at the facts produced in The Changing Body (based on an essay summarizing the book by Robert W. Fogel and Nathaniel Grotte, since the book is not yet available) is that capitalism faced a fundamental problem: it needed capable bodies to produce surplus-value but, during the course of its development, it had disrupted existing food systems and concentrated people in urban centers, which led to widespread malnutrition and communicable diseases. It eventually fixed this problem by securing more food (through increases in domestic agricultural productivity and importing food from abroad) and providing better health care (through advances in medical technology and public health programs).
Taking it one step further, this is the advent of capitalist biopower. Keith Crome [pdf] interprets Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower as designating the set of techniques and technologies through which the basic biological features of the human species become the object of political strategies in modern Western societies:
Like disciplinary techniques and procedures, the technologies of biopower are addressed to a multiplicity, but they are addressed to that multiplicity in so far as it forms a global mass affected by the biological processes of life itself: birth and death, health and illness. To the techniques of discipline that came to hold sway over the human body and which are individualising are added the techniques and technologies of biopower which, on the contrary, but in a complimentary way, are massifying, directed towards humans in the genetic and species sense. As Foucault puts it, biopower involves:
A set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of the population and so-on. It is these processes—the birth rate, the mortality rate, longevity, and so-on— together with a whole series of economic and political problems which […] become biopolitics’ first objects of knowledge and the targets it seeks to control.
The changes documented by Fogel et al. would then be evidence of the extent to which capitalism, over the course of the past three centuries, has successfully (although, of course, unevenly and in a contradictory fashion) created the means to regulate human bodies and to harness life’s forces for work.
What Fogel et al. refer to as “technophysio evolution,” then, is what Foucault summarizes as the “introduction of life into history”—on capitalism terms.
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