The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (38 page)

A detour through the issue of matsutake incomes can help me generalize the point that private assets most always grow out of unacknowledged commons. This point is not just about wily Yunnan peasants. Privatization is never complete; it needs shared spaces to create any value. That is the secret of property’s continuing theft—but also its vulnerability. Consider again matsutake as a commodity, ready to be sent from Yunnan to Japan. What we have is mushrooms, that is, fruiting bodies of underground fungi. The fungi require the traffic of the commons to flourish; no mushrooms emerge without forest disturbance. The privately owned mushroom is an offshoot from a communally living underground body, a body forged through the possibilities of latent commons, human and not human. That it is possible to cordon off the mushroom as an asset without taking its underground commons into account is both the ordinary way with privatization and a quite extraordinary outrage, when you stop to think about it. The contrast between private mushrooms and fungi-forming forest traffic might be an emblem for commoditization more generally: the continual, never-finished cutting off of entanglement.

This brings me back to my earlier concern with alienation as an attribute of nonhumans as well as humans. To become a fully private asset, matsutake mushrooms must be torn not only from their lifeworlds but also from the relations involved in their procurement. Picking the mushroom and transporting it outside the forest can take care of the first of these. But in central Yunnan, as in Oregon, the second rupture takes longer.

In the small town where Michael Hathaway and I based our rural Yunnan research, three men were recognized as the key matsutake “bosses” (
laoban
), that is, the merchants who bought most of the area’s matsutake and sold it in bigger towns. There were also mushroom buyers who came to the town’s periodic markets, but they managed to buy only a small fraction of the matsutake. As the bosses explained, visiting buyers did not have enough local ties.

In watching the work of the bosses and their agents, I was struck particularly by the lack of negotiation over prices and grades, which I had come to expect from my fieldwork in Oregon. One boss sent his driver into the mountains to buy matsutake from villagers there; the pickers handed over the mushrooms without a word, receiving a bundle of cash wordlessly in exchange.
⁸
In other transactions, there was talk, but the pickers never asked the price offered for the mushrooms, instead just taking whatever they were given. I watched one of the bosses receive a box of mushrooms delivered by a bus driver passing by; the boss explained that he would pay the picker later. I also saw pickers work through their own mushrooms, discarding those with insect damage, rather than trying to pass what the buyer did not notice.

All this seemed utterly exotic given my experience in Oregon, where competitive market negotiation took center stage from the moment pickers entered buyers’ space. It was also quite different from what happened just downstream on the Yunnan commodity chain. In dedicated mushroom markets in bigger towns and cities, price and grade negotiations were constant and intense.
⁹
Many wholesale buyers competed against each other, and the scramble to determine the best prices and the most appropriate grade selections took up everyone’s attention. Upstream, in contrast, the buying was quiet.

Everyone we spoke with in the rural margin explained that buying without haggling occurs because of long-term relationships and the trust that goes with them. The bosses would give the pickers their best price, people said. There are community, family, and ethnic-and-linguistic ties between the bosses and the pickers.
¹⁰
They are local guys, part of the small town scene. Pickers trust them.

This “trust” is not a quality that works to everyone’s equal advantage. I do not believe anyone confused “trust” with consensus or equality. Everyone knew that bosses were getting rich off of matsutake; everyone wanted to emulate their success in gaining personal wealth. Still, it is a form of entanglement with reciprocal obligations; as long as the matsutake are embedded in it, they are not fully alienated commodities. The exchange of matsutake in the small town requires the recognition of appropriate social roles. It is only in the mushroom markets of the larger towns that the mushrooms break free, becoming fully alienated creatures of exchange.

In the relation between small-town bosses and pickers, we see, again, how private assets depend on common living spaces. The bosses are able to buy local mushrooms on their own terms because they are entangled with the pickers; they can then transport the mushrooms to bigger towns where they can be converted into private wealth. It is in this light, too, that the project of issuing forest contracts can be understood as a project for redirecting wealth, rather than saving forests.
¹¹
In household forest contracts, contractors can extract the value of the mushrooms, which in turn is drawn from an unacknowledged and fugitive commons. How wealth gets redirected is, however, still somewhat up for grabs. Here, the work of socially conscious Yunnan researchers is pressing. Their job is to turn promising local practices for keeping the wealth in villages and small towns into models for society and conservation.

The conservation part of the equation is the trickiest part, however, because the lust for private wealth only occasionally benefits the forest. Often, instead, it sponsors unexpected destruction. One auction winner proudly showed me how he had learned to milk more wealth out of the matsutake forests he had won the right to harvest. He had his men dig up rare species of flowering trees from the village forest covered under his matsutake contract. The fact that these were rare and little known species, he said, made them even more valuable. Since the city managers of Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, demanded that mature trees suddenly grace what had been treeless streets, he and other entrepreneurs shipped full-grown trees into the city. Most of the trees died from the shock of removal and transport. But those that lived long enough to garner payment fetched a tidy profit. As for the forest, at the very least it lost its diversity—and the beauty of its flowering trees.

Such entrepreneurial stunts are part of the scramble for wealth in today’s China. In them, we can see something about the re-making of humans in conjunction with the salvaging and savaging of landscapes. Matsutake bosses are much-admired figures in Yunnan’s countryside. Bosses are pioneers in the new search for private assets; so many I spoke with wanted to be bosses—if not for matsutake, for some other product extracted from the countryside. One matsutake boss had a plaque in his living room, awarded by the local government, proclaiming him a leader in making money.
¹²
Rural bosses are replacements for socialist heroes;
they are models for human aspirations. Bosses are embodiments of the entrepreneurial spirit. In contrast to earlier socialist dreams, they are supposed to make themselves, not their communities, wealthy. They dream of themselves as self-made men. Yet their autonomous selves bear comparison to matsutake mushrooms: the visible fruit of unrecognized, elusive, and ephemeral commons.

Bosses privatize the wealth of collaboratively produced mushroom growth and collection. Such privatization of common wealth might characterize all entrepreneurs. The Yunnan countryside at this historical moment is good to think with because interest in rationalizing natural resource management extends only to property law and accounting. Privatization takes place merely by claiming the fruits of scavenging—not by reorganizing labor or landscape. I’m not trying to argue that such rationalization would be better; certainly, it would not help matsutake. However, there is something peculiar and frightening in this dedication to salvage, as if everyone were taking advantage of the end of the world to gather up riches before the last bits are destroyed. It is in this feature, too, that rural Yunnan is neither particular nor parochial. It is hard not to see all our enterprises in this same apocalyptic light. In rural Yunnan bosses, we see close-focus models for how to salvage fortunes from the ruin.

Most commentators on China’s new wealth, both Chinese and otherwise, write about millionaires in the cities; but the scramble for private assets is equally intense in the countryside. Farmers, landless migrants, small town bosses, and fancy companies all participate in an “Everything must go” sale. It is hard to know how to think about conservation in such a social climate. However we begin, I don’t think we can afford to forget the connection between value and latent commons. There are no matsutake mushrooms without such evanescent mutualities. There are no assets at all without them. Even as entrepreneurs concentrate their private wealth through building alienation into commodities, they continue to draw from unrecognized entanglements. The thrill of private ownership is the fruit of an underground common.

20

Anti-ending: Some People I Met along the Way

W
HEN
I
VISITED
M
ATSIMAN IN
2007,
HE WAS LIVING
in a small house on top of a hill with his girlfriend and a large number of cats. (“Matsi” is American slang for matsutake.) I had wanted to see matsutake growing in the tanoak forests of coastal Oregon, and he showed me some of his places, where the stumps of once-inspiring Douglas fir, lost through logging, provided encouraging habitat. Tanoak leaves covered the ground like a rug; it seemed impossible to find a mushroom emerging under that. But he showed me how to get down on the ground and to feel the leaves with my hands until I found a promising texture, a lump. We were looking for mushrooms by feel alone—for me, a new way to learn the forest.

This method works only if you know the spots where matsutake are likely to emerge. One needs to know particular plants and fungi, not just generic types. This combination of intimate knowledge and feeling through the duff focuses my attention back on the here and now, the middle of things. We trust our eyes too much. I looked at the ground and thought, “There’s nothing there.” But there was, as Matsiman found
with his hands. Getting by without progress requires a good deal of feeling around with our hands.

In this spirit, I let this chapter wander again through my research sites, recouping moments when I glimpsed the kinds of boundary confusions that mark the edges of alienation—and thus, perhaps, latent commons. Muddling through with others is always in the middle of things; it does not properly conclude. Even as I reiterate key points, I hope a whiff of the adventure-in-process comes through.

Matsiman assumed that name in his excitement for matsutake mushrooms. He picks commercially, and, as an amateur scientist, he studies with fervor. Tracking his patches, he has made an extraordinary record of matsutake production over time in relation to temperature and precipitation. Matsiman is also the name of his website, which is full of information about the mushroom, gathered from many sources; it has also become a space for discussion, particularly among white pickers and buyers.
¹
Matsiman’s passion also brings him into dialogue with the Forest Service, which has used his services for its matsutake research.

Although Matsiman is devoted to his mushrooms, he does not assume they will be enough to support his needs. He has many other dreams and enterprises. When I visited, he showed me specks of gold he had panned from the river and a smoked matsutake powder, which he was trying to sell as a spice. He was experimenting with growing medicinal fungi. He has collected firewood commercially. Matsiman is well aware that he has chosen forms of livelihood at the very edge of capitalism. He hopes never again to work for a wage—and to find places to live in the woods that involve neither owning nor renting. (He was the caretaker for a private mountain on which he lived; later he took an unpaid position as a campground host.) Like many mushroom pickers, he has explored the limit spaces of capitalism, neither properly inside nor outside, where the inability of capitalist forms of discipline to fully capture the world is especially obvious.