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Marxism and Ecological Economics

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Marxism and Ecological Economics Marxism and Ecological Economics Toward a Red and Green Political Economy by Paul Burkett BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006 Contents Preface .............................................................................................................. vii Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One The Value Problem in Ecological Economics: Lessons from the Physiocrats and Marx ................................................ 16 Chapter Two Values in Ecological Value Analysis: What Should We Be Learning from Contingent Valuation Studies? ........................ 56 Chapter Three Natural Capital in Ecological Economics .................... 93 Chapter Four Marxism and the Resistance to Natural Capital .......... 115 Chapter Five Entropy in Ecological Economics: A Marxist Intervention .............................................................................. 142 Chapter Six Energy, Entropy and Classical Marxism: Debunking the Podolinsky Myth ............................................................ 174 Chapter Seven Power Inequality and the Environment ...................... 208 Chapter Eight Sraffian Models of Ecological Conflict and Crisis ...... 220 Chapter Nine Towards a Marxist Approach to Ecological Conflicts and Crises .................................................................................................... 260 vi • Contents Chapter Ten Marxism, Ecological Economics, and Sustainable Human Development ................................................................................ 301 References ........................................................................................................ 333 Index ................................................................................................................ 351 Preface This book aims at instigating a dialogue between Marxist political economy and ecological economics. It shows how Marxism can help ecological economics better fulfill its commitments to methodological pluralism, interdisciplinarity, and openness to new visions of policy and of structural economic change that confront the current biospheric crisis. The potential contribution of Marxism to ecological economics is developed in terms of four fundamental issues: (i) the relations between nature and economic value; (ii) the treatment of nature as capital; (iii) the significance of the entropy law for economic systems; (iv) the concept of sustainable development. In writing this book, I have made a conscious effort to avoid the kind of ad hominem argumentation that has all too often hampered the effectiveness of intellectual interchanges between Marxism and ecological economics. I have tried to engage seriously with the central features of ecological economics as a ‘meta-paradigm’ as well as its core theoretical constructs in the four above-mentioned issue areas. I hope that the result is a book that will be useful not only to Marxists and ecological economists interested in pursuing dialogue, but also to those just seeking a critical, but readable, introduction to the basic ideas of ecological economics. That the book was written by a relative ‘outsider’ to ecological economics will not, I trust, cripple its effectiveness in either function, and may even help it a bit. To risk a cliché, sometimes an outsider can better distinguish the forest from the trees. Although my Marxist engagement with ecological economics dates to the early 1990s, the idea of this book germinated on the evening of 19 October 2001, when I had to respond to a public talk given by Herman Daly in conjunction with an interdisciplinary conference on ‘Causes and Cures of Poverty’, sponsored by the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology in California. My gratitude is extended both to Herman Daly and to the audience that evening for their gracious reception of, and encouraging responses to, my comments. viii • Preface I want to thank Sebastian Budgen and the rest of the Historical Materialism Book Series editorial board, along with Sasha Goldstein and Joed Elich at Brill, for supporting this project. Several other people provided crucial help at various stages. Alfredo Saad-Filho read an early prospectus for the book and encouraged me to pursue it to completion. Kozo Mayumi emailed several of his most recent papers on entropic economics in pre-published form, and this was especially helpful for my work on Chapter 5. Ben Fine offered incisive comments on the manuscript for Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 2 benefited enormously from critical comments by Michael Perelman, from additional readings suggested by Patrick Bond and Larry Lohmann, and from Rick Lotspeich’s insights into contingent valuation analysis. Rick’s father, Frederick B. Lotspeich, donated his entire collection of the journal Ecological Economics to the Economics Department library at Indiana State University, which greatly facilitated my study of the discipline. Angelo Di Salvo and Mark Hudson translated the work of Sergei Podolinsky into English, and without this translation the research summarised in Chapter 6 could not have been done. Most of all, I want to thank John Bellamy Foster not only for allowing me to draw from our co-produced work on the ‘Podolinsky business’ for Chapter 6, but also for sharing his own insights into Marxism and ecology over the years and for his constant encouragement and support. Several of the chapters in this book are based, in whole or in part, on articles published in scholarly journals, and I wish to thank their respective editors for considering my work and giving permission for it to reappear here in revised form: John Jermier at Organization & Environment (Chapter 1);1 Malcolm Sawyer at the International Papers in Political Economzy (Chapters 3 and 4);2 Sebastian Budgen at Historical Materialism (Chapter 5);3 Karen Lucas at Theory and Society (Chapter 6).4 In addition, some of the arguments in different chapters were initially aired at conference sessions whose participants kindly provided important encouragement and feedback: the Marxist Sociology session at the American Sociological Association Meetings, San Francisco, 14–17 August 2004, especially 1 Burkett 2003b. 2 Burkett 2003d. 3 Burkett 2005. 4 Burkett and Foster 2006. Preface • ix Brett Clark (Chapter 6); the Conference on ‘Causes and Cures of Poverty’, Center for Process Studies, Claremont School of Theology, 18–21 October 2001, especially Walt Sheasby, Herman Daly, Wes Jackson, and John Cobb (Chapter 9); and the Conference on ‘The Work of Karl Marx and Challenges for the 21st Century’, Havana, Cuba, 5–8 May 2003, especially Michael Lebowitz and Barbara Foley (Chapter 10). Thanks are also due to my colleagues in the Economics Department at Indiana State University, Terre Haute, for approving the one-semester leave required to put this book together, and more generally for constructing the kind of open and non-dogmatic setting needed for heterodox scholars to get their work done. In addition, essential research support was provided by the Interlibrary Loan Department at Cunningham Library, Indiana State University. Finally, I extend loving gratitude to Suzanne Carter, who for whatever reason has put up with me for two decades now, and to Patrick and Molly Burkett for their patience with the fluctuating moods that their father exhibited during the composition of this work. Terre Haute, Indiana August, 2005 Introduction This book has two purposes: to undertake the first general assessment of ecological economics from a Marxist point of view, and to show how Marxist political economy can make a substantial contribution to ecological economics. By pursuing these two goals, the book tries to lay the basis for a more substantive dialogue between Marxists and ecological economists. In an age of worsening environmental and biospheric crises, the general importance of productive interchanges among all schools of ecological thought needs no defence. But the specific motivations for this attempt at paradigm-bridging, and the approach used in the attempt, have both been shaped by a particular understanding of ecological economics as a discipline. Accordingly, Section I of this Introduction sketches the defining characteristics of ecological economics. Since these characteristics may be interpreted as analytical aspirations, they can double as criteria for evaluating the discipline and Marxism’s potential contribution to it. Section I also introduces the substantive issues through which this assessment is developed. The specific needs that can be served by such an assessment at the present time are further discussed in Section II. Without underestimating the considerable historical-intellectual barriers to a productive dialogue, it is suggested that recent developments in ecological economics and ecological Marxism have created an opportunity for these 2 • Introduction barriers to be overcome. Section III provides a brief overview of the subsequent chapters. I. A framework for assessing ecological economics This book’s assessment is not ‘general’ in the sense of surveying all, or even most, of the subject matters addressed by ecological economics. There is no way that one book can evaluate all the research projects that have been undertaken by members of the discipline. Rather, the book’s assessment is ‘general’ insofar as it is developed in terms of the methodological aspirations defining ecological economics as a field of study. Based on the pronouncements of some of its most
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