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Marx and Nature: a Red and Green Perspective

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Marx and Nature: a Red and Green Perspective Marx and Nature A Red and Green Perspective Paul Burkett 1999 Contents Preface and Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Part I Nature and Historical Materialism 1. Requirements of a Social Ecology 17 2. Nature, Labor, and Production 25 3. The Natural Basis of Labor Productivity and Surplus Labor 33 4. Labor and Labor Power as Natural and Social Forces 49 Part II Nature and Capitalism 5. Nature, Labor, and Capitalist Production 57 6. Capital’s “Free Appropriation” of Natural and Social Conditions 69 7. Capitalism and Nature:A Value-Form Approach 79 8. Reconsidering Some Ecological Criticisms of Marx’s Value Analysis 99 9. Capitalism and Environmental Crisis 107 10. Marx’s Working-Day Analysis and Environmental Crisis 133 Part III Nature and Communism 11. Nature and the Historical Progressivity of Capitalism 147 12. Nature and Capitalism’s Historical Limits 175 13. Capital, Nature, and Class Struggle 199 14. Nature and Associated Production 223 Notes 259 References 297 Index 309 Preface and Acknowledgements n reconstructing Marx’s approach to nature under capitalism and com- I munism, this book responds to three common criticisms of Marx: 1. Marx fell prey to a “productivist” or “Promethean” vision under which (a) capitalist development of the productive forces allows human production to completely overcome natural constraints; (b) communism is projected as extending and rationalizing capitalism’s drive toward complete human domination over nature; and (c) both capitalism and communism demonstrate an inevitable antagonism between humanity and nature. 2. Marx’s analysis of capitalism excludes or downgrades the contribu- tion of nature to production; this applies especially to Marx’s labor theory of value. 3. Marx’s critique of the contradictions of capitalism has nothing to do with nature or with the natural conditions of production. The primary motivation of this book is to address these three claims and their most common corollaries in systematic, textually informed and politically useful fashion. I will argue that Marx’s approach to nature pos- sesses an inner logic, coherence, and analytical power that have not yet been recognized even by ecological Marxists. Over the past several years, when asked about the subject of this work, my answer has normally been: “Green and Red.” In a way, this response sums up my intellectual debts. I first became interested in environmental issues during my undergraduate days at Kalamazoo College, where in 1977 I wrote a senior thesis entitled “An Environmental Economist’s Case for Organic Revolution.” I want to thank Bob Brownlee and the late Louis Junker for their inspiration and encouragement at that time, which planted the seeds of the Green in the present work. viii • Marx and Nature I began seriously studying Marxism while pursuing a graduate eco- nomics degree at Syracuse University.This interest was encouraged most of all by the late Jesse Burkhead, an outstanding teacher of the history of economic thought who was a beacon of intellectual openness to many Syracuse graduate students. Given my earlier interests, it was inevitable that I would never see Marxism as an alternative to environmentalism but rather as a particular kind of environmentalism, one that considers people-nature relations from the standpoint of class relations and the requirements of human emanci- pation. For a number of reasons of a personal, political, and professional na- ture, however, only recently was I able to investigate this way of thinking in a scholarly fashion. My return to the Green by way of the Red has been greatly helped by John Bellamy Foster, who was kind enough to read and offer comments on the rough notes leading to this book. John has been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in my work. My gratitude is extended to my colleagues at Indiana State University for granting the leave time needed to finish this book. I also want to thank my immediate family members for putting up with me during the writ- ing of it.Thank you, Suzanne, Shaun, Patrick, and Molly. Although I owe much to the above-mentioned individuals, any errors or shortcomings in the book are my responsibility alone. Portions of several chapters have previously appeared in scholarly jour- nals. I thank their respective publishers for permission to reprint from Sci- ence & Society, Fall 1996 (Chapter 7); Nature, Society, and Thought, in press (Chapter 9); Monthly Review, in press (Chapter 12); Capitalism, Nature, So- cialism, December 1995 (Chapter 13); and Organization & Environment, June 1997 (Chapter 13). Finally, a stylistic note. Many of the passages quoted in this book con- tain emphasized words and phrases.To avoid cluttering up the presentation with an endless stream of qualifiers, it is simply indicated here that all em- phases are in the original unless noted otherwise. Terre Haute, Indiana October, 1998 Introduction his book reconstructs Marx’s approach to nature, society, and en- vironmental crisis.The focus on environmental issues needs little Tjustification.There may still be disagreement about the threat to human survival posed by society’s environmental impacts, but no one can doubt that individual ecosystems and the global biosphere are both in- creasingly shaped by human production and consumption (Vitousek, et al., 1997). Given the quantitatively limited character of natural condi- tions, it follows that the quality of human-social development will in- evitably suffer if fundamentally new forms of social regulation are not applied to the human appropriation of natural wealth (Schnaiberg and Gould, 1994). In short, the environmental problem is not simply one of human survival versus human extinction (which is not to deny the lat- ter possibility). It mainly involves alternative forms of co-evolution of so- ciety and nature, differing in terms of the human-developmental possibilities and restrictions they generate (Altvater, 1990, 26–8; Gowdy, 1994a and 1994b). The reader may be bemused by the notion that Marx has something useful to say about environmental problems.The basic hypothesis inform- ing this book, however, is that Marx’s treatment of natural conditions pos- sesses an inner logic, coherence, and analytical power that have not yet been recognized even in the ecological Marxist (or “eco-Marxist”) litera- ture. The power of Marx’s approach stems, first, from its consistent treat- ment of human production in terms of the mutual constitution of its social form and its material content.While recognizing that production is struc- tured by historically developed relations among producers and between producers and appropriators of the surplus product, Marx also insists that production as both a social and a material process is shaped and con- strained by natural conditions, including, of course, the natural condition of human bodily existence. For example, Marx treats capitalist people- nature relations as necessary forms of the capital-labor relation and vice 2 • Marx and Nature versa; the two are viewed as mutually constituted parts of a class-contra- dictory material and social whole. The second key feature of Marx’s approach to nature is his dialectical perspective on the historical necessity and limits of particular forms of human production. Hence, while indicating the new possibilities capital- ism creates for human development, Marx also explains how capitalist re- lations prevent these possibilities from being realized. What makes this perspective dialectical is its recognition that capitalism’s humanly restric- tive properties are actually worsened insofar as production is developed under the sway of capitalist relations. Marx applies this method not just to the capital-labor relation and to competitive relations among capitalists but also to human relations with nature, insofar as these are shaped by and sup- port capitalist exploitation and competition. In this way, Marx’s approach leads to an historical analysis of capitalist environmental crisis. The unutilized potential of Marx’s approach for analysis of the histori- cal co-evolution of society and nature is not widely recognized.As alluded to earlier, this is mainly due, I believe, to an inadequate grasp of the over- arching logic of Marx’s various statements dealing with natural conditions. At the risk of making claims only fully defended later, I will now establish in a preliminary way that many ecological commentators do indeed deny the methodological integrity of Marx’s approach to nature. Some Common (Partial) Interpretations of Marx’s Approach The notion that Marx never developed a coherent approach to nature has many guises. It appears most clearly in the treatment of Marx’s statements on natural conditions as isolated observations inessential to his historical world-view or his analysis of capitalism. The renowned Marxist scholar Michael Löwy,for example, suggests that “in Capital one can find here and there references to the exhaustion of nature by capital” but that “Marx does not possess an integrated ecological perspective” (1997, 34). Similarly, Joel Kovel refers to “a number of strikingly prescient observations about the ecological relations of capital in Marx’s writings” in apparent isolation from Marx’s main analysis of value and capital accumulation (1997, 14). Left unanswered is the question as to why Marx would feel it necessary to make such observations (indicating their empirical relevance) yet not de- velop their importance in terms of the fundamental categories of capital- ist production. Such a procedure seems completely foreign to anyone familiar with Capital’s systematic, logical development and empirical illus- Introduction • 3 tration of analytical categories (cf. Rosdolsky,1977; Fine and Harris, 1979; Smith, 1990). Instead of addressing this problem, or trying to reconstruct the role natural conditions actually play in Marx’s critique of political economy, the ecological critics often engage in a kind of negative quotation-mon- gering in which Marx’s ecological correctness is gauged by the volume of material in which he directly discusses various phenomena of contempo- rary ecological relevance (see, for example, O’Connor, 1994, 57–58).
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