Revisiting Connections Between Capital and Nature I: The Importance of Labour

ABSTRACT

This paper reconsiders Marx’s theory of capital in the light of more recent discussions of the relationship between capital and nature. It points out how this theory continues to be misrepresented and misunderstood by a number of scholars, and argues that one reason for such failings is a tendency to neglect the role of labour in mediating this relationship. Further, the paper reviews literature relating to the value of nature, primitive accumulation, natural capital and the production of nature, in order to show the importance of the concept of labour and the limitations of approaches that do not recognize that importance.

KEYWORDS:

• Value
• capital
• nature
• labour

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This occurs through the equalization of concrete acts of labour under the discipline of competition (Saad-Filho 2002, 26–29).

2 Walker (2017) accuses Marx of two “fatal errors” (pages 54 and 57) in saying that only labour can create value, while nature contributes only use-values. In fact, Marx says that labour creates both value and use-values, and all labour involves nature; under capitalism, non-human nature does not itself create value but it participates in that creation through the labour process. Therefore, the errors are Walker’s, not Marx’s.

3 Insofar as capitalism does not take nature seriously, metabolic or ecological rifts of one kind or another are more or less inevitable (though not necessarily predictable), as originally noted by Marx (Clark and York 2005; Foster and Burkett 2017). Such rifts, however, can also present opportunities for further capital accumulation.

4 Huber, however, tends to misidentify the emergence of the real subsumption of labour (which Marx identified with the initiation of the factory system) with the mass use of fossil-fuel energy, while Malm clearly shows that the factory system was originally based on hydro-power (water wheels and canals), not fossil fuels. For capitalist production, the key issue is not the mobility or density of the energy source (hydro power has a much higher EROEI than coal, anyway) but the mobility of labour. To the question: “Should capitalism be viewed as a ‘fossil fuel mode of production?’” (Huber 2008, 113), the answer must surely be no. And from this it follows that we cannot rule out a priori the possibility of a capitalism based on renewable energy. See also Mitchell (2013) on the historical shift from coal to oil.

5 Like primitive accumulation, this may involve “green grabbing” (Vidal 2008), defined as “the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends” (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012, 238) – for more on land grabbing in particular, see Franco et al. (2013). There is some doubt about whether green grabbing achieves any worthwhile environmental ends in some cases – see, for example, Filer (2012).

6 Sullivan (2014) objects to nature being treated as a form of capital, which is of course what happens under capitalism. Elsewhere, however, Sullivan (2013) explicitly recognizes nature conservation as a capitalist project, in which nature is appropriated as abstract monetized value (Sullivan 2013, 207).

7 On planetary boundaries, see Rockström, Steffen, and Foley (2009).

8 “Market-based” approaches to nature are not always what they claim to be, anyway. As Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones (2012, 247) note: “green markets are often monopolistic or oligopolistic, involving highly collusive behaviour.”

9 This is not so much to do with Polanyi’s concept of fictitious commodities (namely, land, labour and money, embedded in social relationships), as with Marx’s concept of fictitious capital in Capital vol. 3 ch. 25 – use-values that have the appearance of capital but do not express self-expanding value or “are not produced through a productive consumption of labour power.” (Felli 2014, 268) Felli (2014, 251) argues that emission rights are not commodities at all but “merely depoliticized forms in which climate rent is extracted and circulates to preclude political debates about the goals of production.”

10 “The price paid by the user of emissions rights [for example – but the same argument applies to many other ecosystem services] is not the price paid for a commodity because what is bought has not been produced by labour. Rather, it is a form of rent.” (Felli 2014, 268)

11 According to Robbins (2004), political ecology is all about explaining the production of nature and understanding how that production helps to shape social relations.