Value, Nature, and Labor: A Defense of Marx

ABSTRACT

In this theoretical intervention, I argue that Karl Marx’s theory of value remains a powerful way to understand nature–society relations under capitalism. I suggest environmentalist critiques often misunderstand Marx’s value theory as a theory that “values” workers over nature. His critical theory is better understood as an explanation of how capitalist value exploits both workers and the environment. My defense of Marxian value theory is articulated through five “theses.” I provide empirical illustration based on recent research into the nitrogen fertilizer industry. (1) Value theory does not refer to all values. (2) Marx’s contention that nature does not contribute to value helps us explain its degradation under capitalism. (3) Marx’s value theory rooted in production allows for a critique of environmental economic valuation schemes (e.g. payments for ecosystem services) which are based on neoclassical value theories rooted in consumption/exchange. (4) Value is abstract social labor, but that means it also abstracts from nature. (5) Capital does value certain parts of nature and that matters. I conclude by advocating a “value theory of nature” in the spirit of Diane Elson’s powerful articulation of Marx’s “value theory of labor.”

KEYWORDS:

• Value
• labor
• nature

Acknowledgements

Elaboration of the ideas in this article would not have been possible without many conversations and debates with my wonderful adviser at Clark University, Jody Emel. I also want to acknowledge the students in the two versions of “The Geography of Capital” I taught at Syracuse in the Fall of 2013 and 2015. I would like to especially thank Miles Kenney-Lazar and Kelly Kay and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts. Finally, thanks to Jon Erickson and Carlo Sica for their Research Assistantship help on the fertilizer research. All mistakes are my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Robertson and Wainwright (2013) effectively refute this characterization.

2 Clearly such organizers have not read Marx’s takedown of this refrain in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875): “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.”

3 I am primarily influenced by geographers using the concept of value to grasp the “totality” of global capitalism and its uneven geographies (Harvey 1982; Smith 2009; Henderson 2013). Yet the Marxist literature on this question goes much deeper. Like Mann (2010), my thinking has been highly influenced by Elson’s (1979) “value theory of labor” and Postone’s (1993, 8) critique of normative value theory “from the standpoint of labor.” Postone (1993, 6) suggests a “critique of labor in capitalism” that is very much in line with my views. The ideas presented here also emerge from teaching Capital, Volume 1 twice over the last three years. While teaching, I have found Heinrich’s (2012) introduction to the three volumes of Capital extremely useful and unusually clear on the value question.

4 This statement is complicated by the issue of “rent.” As Marx reviews Ricardo in Volume III of Capital ([1894] 1981), differential rents accrue to landowners on soils/lands that are naturally more productive than other lands (because value is set by production on the “worst land”). Thus, this could be seen as a “payment” for the natural force of higher soil fertility, or for the geological processes that make an oil well more productive in the Middle East than in Alberta. However, what is clear is that these payments are not reflections of value produced by labor, but rather more of a byproduct of the capitalist system of private property wherein “certain persons enjoy the monopoly of disposing of particular portions of the globe as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others” (Marx [1894] 1981, 752). I would also add that “rent” as a “payment” to nature still is not able to properly “value” and “monetize” the diverse and complicated ecological processes that underpin capitalist production. See Felli (2014) for a provocative argument that carbon markets reflect nothing whatsoever to do with the “value” of emissions as tradable commodities, and are more accurately conceptualized as state-supported rents.

5 In a pivotal passage Smith (2009, 80) concedes that his “production of nature” thesis includes the very broad ways in which capitalism and human activity alter nature: “[S]ome aspects of nature may have been altered dramatically by human activity, without this having been in any way an investment in socially necessary labor time.” It is instructive that he uses the “alteration of the climate by human activity” as one of his examples (way back in 1984!).

6 Indeed, claiming there is abstract social labor on one side and abstract social nature on the other reproduces the very “Cartesian dualism” that Moore claims to critique.

7 It is difficult to do this without deeply technical understandings of the labor process. Intuitively, hydraulic fracking seems to take more labor and machinery to produce equivalent quantities of natural gas. This assumption would lead one to assume a rising value of the commodity. Perhaps the glut of natural gas produced by fracking is a transition where supply exceeds demand and therefore the price is below its value. The concerted effort of the natural gas industry to export Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and thus raise the price is perhaps their effort to push the price closer to its value. This all said, it is also possible to see how technical innovations in the labor process—and the increase in labor productivity—in fracking could actually serve to lower its socially necessary labor time and value. This could still allow us to conclude that the current low price is below its value but its current value is much lower than it was ten years ago.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by funding from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the National Science Foundation [grant number 1437248].