HIMA 13,1_265_f6_117-152 3/14/05 2:50 PM Page 117

Paul Burkett in : A Marxist Intervention

Introduction One of the liveliest debates in ecological economics concerns the significance of the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the entropy law. This article critically surveys this debate and develops a Marxist perspective on the economy-entropy relationship. Entropy is a measure of the total disorder, randomness or chaos in a system: increased entropy implies greater disorder. The second law says that the entropy of an isolated thermodynamic system is strictly non-decreasing, that is, that energy is only transformed from more ordered to less ordered forms. Heat, for example, can only dissipate: it will not flow spontaneously from a cold to a hot object or area in an isolated system.1 If one interprets the orderliness of energy as a measure of its availability or usefulness to humans, then the entropy law implies that all energy transformations convert energy into less available and less useful forms. Energy cannot be transformed into work without some of the energy

1 Fermi 1956, p. 30; Van Ness 1983, p. 54.

Historical Materialism, volume 13:1 (117–152) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 13,1_265_f6_117-152 3/14/05 2:50 PM Page 118

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being dissipated as unrecoverable heat. An engine cannot operate at one hundred per cent efficiency, that is, on a cycle whose only effect is to convert energy into work: a refrigerator will not operate unless it is plugged in. The economic importance of the entropy law was first argued systematically by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly. The first section outlines their analysis, including their application of the entropy law to the materials (not just energy) used in human production. The second section sets out four ‘tracks’ or sub-controversies within the ensuing debate, respectively concerning whether: (i) the purposeful character of human production negates the applicability of the entropy law; (ii) the economically relevant concept of entropy is definable apart from human purposes and technologies; (iii) solar energy can be used to achieve a complete, or practically complete, recycling of material resources; (iv) market prices already reflect (or can be made to reflect, using government policies) all economically relevant entropic phenomena. While pointing out the insights generated by each of the four tracks, I argue that the entropy debate suffers from the absence of a class perspective on nature and human production. From a Marxist standpoint, entropy as order or usefulness is indeed an anthropomorphic category, but this needs to be developed in terms of the class relations that shape the productive use of nature. The neglect of class is reflected in the uncritical views on market valuation of nature espoused in the entropy-economy debate. The failure to root the market in production relations also explains the debate’s reliance on artificial dichotomies between allocation and scale on the one hand, and between material conditions and human values and purposes on the other. The third section amplifies the Marxist view by considering capitalist relations as material and social relations. This opens up a dialectical perspective on entropy encompassing the close connections between wage-labour, market valuation and the qualitative deterioration of natural wealth. Since this approach is materialist, it recognises that the entropy law does apply in terms of any given quality of materials and energy available for human production. But it also suggests that, short of human extinction, capitalist reproduction in no way hinges on the maintenance of natural wealth of any given entropy level. In other words, capitalistically-induced crises in the conditions of human development do not necessarily mean crises of capitalist reproduction. Capitalism’s ecological-entropic dynamics thus pose a challenge to all who would champion ecological values: to envision new communal and non-