Capital and Nature:
An Interview with Paul Burkett
by João Aguiar
1. The year 2007 marks the 140th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Marx's Capital. In your perspective, what is the main contribution of that major work to the understanding of contemporary capitalism?
Marx's Capital establishes three essential contradictions of capitalism which grow in intensity as the system develops historically. These contradictions should be seen as interconnected. First, there is the contradiction between use value and exchange value. This should not be treated as merely a formal, abstract contradiction as is sometimes done in modern theoretical interpretations of Marx's work. Rather, it must be seen as the historical development of the tension between the requirements of money-making and monetary valuation on the one hand, and the needs of human beings, of sustainable human development, on the other. In Marx's view, capitalism worsens this tension precisely insofar as it develops and socializes productive forces (labor and nature) in line with the requirements of competitive production for profit.
The second contradiction established by Marx is the essentially class-exploitative nature of capitalism, its reliance on the extraction of surplus labor time from the direct producers. Marx shows how the wage-labor form both conceals and is shaped by the fact that workers perform surplus labor for the capitalist even insofar as they are paid the value of their labor power. He also shows that this exploitation is based on capitalism's specific social separation of workers from access to and control over necessary conditions of production. This separation is what forces workers to accept worktimes longer than those necessary to produce their own commodified means of subsistence, even though the extension of the length and intensity of worktime hinders their development as human beings. More specifically -- and this aspect has not been adequately appreciated -- Marx shows how this forced surplus labor time involves capital's appropriation of the labor power (potential work) that is produced during workers' non-worktime, not only through rest and recuperation but also through the domestic reproductive labors of workers and other members of worker-households.
From these first two contradictions emerges the third main contradiction established by Capital: capitalism's tendency to generate crises of economic and social reproduction. Marx outlined two basic kinds of capitalist crisis. The first, more specific type, which has been the subject of much debate among Marxists, involves what might be termed narrowly economic crises of accumulation due to falling profitability, or an inability to reinvest profits in a way that yields more profit. However, periodic accumulation crises should be seen as a specific outgrowth of the more general, secular, and ever worsening crisis of capitalism, namely, the inability of the system to create and maintain natural and social conditions required for the sustainable development of human beings. Marx himself focused on this second form of crisis in his discussion of the general law of capitalist accumulation in Chapter 25 of Capital, Volume I, which showed capitalism's tendency to create a growing reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers even apart from its periodic accumulation crises. But he also dealt with the contradiction between capital accumulation and the natural conditions of human development, especially in his discussion of "Modern Industry and Agriculture" in Chapter 15 of the same volume. In fact, Marx's analysis of the natural and social environmental crises generated by capitalism are the main focus of John Bellamy Foster's quite important work, Marx's Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000) and of my own book, Marx and Nature (St. Martin's Press, 1999).
It must be stressed that, for Marx, both of these two forms of crisis are inevitable historical outgrowths of the use value versus exchange value contradiction and of the class-exploitative nature of capitalism.
2. Contrary to many interpretations, Marx studied and included an ecological analysis in Capital as you have shown in Marx and Nature. How does Marx integrate ecological insights into the theoretical body of Capital?
Marx's Capital integrates ecological insights in two general ways. First, Marx emphasizes the separation of workers from the land, from the earth, as the foundation of capitalism. Like other necessary conditions of production which are appropriated by capital, the land (nature) appears to wage-laborers as an external condition of their existence, one which they can only gain access to by agreeing to sell their labor power to the capitalist. This specifically capitalistic separation of the producers from reproductive access to the land is of course an ongoing historical process. As David Harvey has recently emphasized in his work The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003), this kind of "accumulation by dispossession" has become one of the main sources of profit in capitalism's current, neoliberal phase. Its ecological significance is just as obvious. By first separating land and laborers and then combining them in production driven by competitive profit-making, capitalism develops their combined productive powers in ways that are more and more alienated from the requirements of ecological sustainability. Unlike earlier modes of production such as feudalism, in which workers were socially tied to the land, capitalist production is not reliant on particular natural conditions and ecosystems, and can therefore afford to violate the conditions of ecological sustainability and "move on" (both spatially and functionally) to the exploitation of new use values producible by labor and nature. Put differently, capitalism has an historically unprecedented ability to sustain itself through the production of ecologically unsustainable use values -- which is precisely why it has the potential to create ecological crises that are unprecedented in scope and depth, all the way up to the global, biospheric level.
Second, Marx incorporates ecological concerns through his analysis of capitalist market valuation. Although this claim may seem paradoxical, the fact is that ecological criticisms of Marx's "labor theory of value" wrongly interpret this theory as a normative assertion that, compared to nature, labor is a more important or primary condition of production. For Marx, however, production of use values always requires both nature and labor, and labor is itself a metabolic relationship between people (themselves natural, albeit socially developed, beings) and nature. Marx did not himself reduce value to abstract, socially necessary labor time; rather his claim is that capitalism, based on its separation of laborers from necessary conditions of production, values commodities in this way. Hence, the tension between labor values and the natural requirements of sustainable production should be seen as an immanent outgrowth of the more basic contradictions between use value and exchange value and between labor and capital. Capital accumulation relies on both nature and labor as material vehicles for the production and realization of surplus value; yet, in the aggregate, it values commodities only in line with the abstract labor they contain. Monetary rents are purely redistributive and suffer from their own ecological contradictions -- see below. In any case, the norm under capitalism is the free appropriation and abuse of the use values latent in nature for purposes of competitive production for profit.
It must be emphasized that, for Marx, the production of values (in the sense of exchange values) itself requires that these values be objectified in saleable use values. If a commodity (and the labor that produces it) does not serve a human need (however illusory, uncivilized, or ecologically damaging), then it will not count as value in the market. This is precisely how the "social necessity" of value as socially necessary labor time is anarchically enforced through the market. Hence capital accumulation, the production and reinvestment of surplus value, remains dependent upon use values produced by both labor and nature. Capital accumulation requires not only exploitable labor power but also material, natural, conditions that enable labor power to be exploited and surplus labor to be objectified in vendible commodities. This helps explain why capitalism has been so damaging to the environment throughout its history and why it is currently threatening the livability of our planet. In short, far from being anti-ecological, Marx's critical analysis of capitalist valuation is essential to an adequate understanding of environmental crises both historical and contemporary.
3. To confront our ecological problems adequately we need to understand the interrelation between society (a certain mode of production) and nature. Can you explain to us how this metabolism works under capitalism?
As already noted, capitalism's specific forms of metabolism with nature are shaped by its radical separation of the direct producers from necessary conditions of production, starting with the land.
For example, it is only on the basis of the commodification of "free" labor power (workers separated from the land and other production conditions) that the commodity and money forms come to dominate society's economic reproduction and hence its metabolic interactions (exchanges of matter and energy) with nature. Monetary valuation is of course a necessity under capitalism, due to the need for a general equivalent of value in the sense of abstract labor time. The ecological contradictions of monetary valuation and market pricing of the environment -- which, it must be noted, apply fully to all kinds of rents, whether implemented privately or by governments -- are thus intrinsic to capitalism and therefore completely immune to all reforms that keep capitalist relations of wage-labor and market exchange intact. And these contradictions are antagonistic indeed. Money and monetary values are homogenous, divisible, mobile, reversible, and quantitatively unlimited, by contrast with the qualitative variety (and ongoing variegation), indivisibility, locational uniqueness, irreversibility, and quantitative limits to natural use values including ecological systems. As I showed in my book Marx and Nature, the ecological contradictions of monetary valuation are all logically implied by Marx's value analysis, and in several cases were consciously highlighted by Marx. While many contemporary non-Marxist ecological economists have also pointed out the shortcomings of market pricing, they have done so without rooting their analysis in the system's basic relations of production (see my book Marxism and Ecological Economics [Brill, 2006 for a sympathetic critique of ecological economics).
Of course, capitalism's concrete effects on its environment cannot be read off directly from the abstract ecological contradictions of money and monetary valuation. Their analysis requires detailed study of the system's historical development as shaped by class and competitive struggles on both national and global levels. Marx himself showed how capitalism's development of mechanized industrial productive forces -- the factory system -- generated unprecedented advances in labor productivity which translated directly into historically huge increases in the throughput of matter and energy drawn from and emitted into the natural environment. This analysis can be located in terms of the two kinds of capitalist crisis mentioned earlier. On one level, capitalism's growing appetite for raw materials (including ancillary materials used as energy sources) inevitably results in shortages of these materials due to the dependence of materials production on natural conditions which cannot be reproduced by capitalist enterprise itself. The main example of such materials-supply problems treated by Marx was the 19th-century cotton crises that afflicted England and other early industrializing countries. Marx's theoretical analysis of these crises was quite sophisticated, taking into account the interplay between value relations, technological and other physical production constraints, rents, and the role of the credit system and speculation in worsening materials shortages and price fluctuations. His analysis can easily be extended and adapted to contemporary oil crises, for example. (See Chapter 9 of my book Marx and Nature.)
On another level, Marxism provides insights into how capitalism's specific metabolism generates crises in the natural conditions of human development. One insight involves what the leading ecological economist Herman Daly has termed the "breaking of the solar budget constraint" through the utilization of fossil fuels, especially starting with the industrial revolution. The causes of this development are highly relevant to any serious discussion of today's global warming problem, not to speak of contemporary "oil shocks." Here, ecological economists basically take the discovery of fossil fuels as a given "original sin" and blame it -- together with exogenous cultural factors such as the "ideology of growth" -- for the system's shift onto an ecologically unsustainable path. (See especially the work of the late great Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.) Marx's analysis is quite different. In Capital's chapter on "Machinery and Modern Industry," he shows that an essential precondition for greater use of fossil fuel-driven steam engines was the separation of workers from control over the tools used in production and the installation of these tools in machines which could then be powered not just by human and other animate energy but by inanimate "motive forces." In other words, it was capitalism's specific production relations that generated the break with the solar budget constraint. (See the article co-written by John Bellamy Foster and myself in the journal Theory and Society (February 2006).)
Finally, Marx showed that capitalism's spatial separation and industrial integration of manufacturing and agriculture resulted in a failure to recycle the nutrients extracted from the soil and the conversion of these nutrients into unhealthy pollutants, side-by-side with the vitiation of labor power by long and intensive worktimes and by enervating living conditions in urban areas. Informed by his studies of Justus von Liebig and other scientists, Marx saw this development as a metabolic rift in the circulation of matter and energy required for the sustainable reproduction of human-natural systems. Recent work by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York, Rebecca Clausen, and Philip Mancus has reconstructed Marx's metabolic rift analysis and extended it to the contemporary problems of global warming, depletion and degradation of oceanic ecosystems by industrial fishing and aquaculture, and disruptions to the global nitrogen cycle brought on by overuse of inorganic fertilizers in industrial agriculture. Foster, Clark, and Jason Moore have used the rift approach to show how "ecological imperialism" (the guano trade, sugar plantations, etc.) and resultant ecological crises have been central to capitalist development and underdevelopment on a global scale. (See Chapter 9 of my book, Marxism and Ecological Economics.)
In sum, what Marxism provides that other theories can't is precisely a demonstration that capitalism does have its own specific metabolism with nature -- one shaped by its profoundly anti-ecological separation of workers from conditions of production and its corresponding forms of market exchange and monetary valuation. From this perspective, any solution for contemporary ecological crises must be explicitly anti-capitalist, that is, based on the democratic socialization of nature and other conditions of production by workers and communities.
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