Buying vitamins: Newfoundland cod liver oil and the real subsumption of nature, 1919-1939

The discovery of new use-values in commodities by science and the creation of new needs in consumers by marketing is a capitalist imperative. Drawing on archival work that examines the effects of the scientific discovery of vitamins on Newfoundland's interwar cod liver oil industry, this paper locates these processes as a moment in an expanded conception of the real subsumption of nature under capital. I identify intensive and extensive logics of circulation that map onto the division between absolute and relative surplus-value, on the one hand, and the formal and real subsumption of nature, on the other. I conclude by arguing that understanding the full historical geography of real subsumption, by extending its scope beyond production and its periodization beyond the neoliberal era, is essential for reckoning and resisting the contemporary destruction of the world-ocean.