On Nature, Degradation, and Life-Making in Late Capitalism

ABSTRACT

This paper grapples with scholarly debates at the intersection of environmental degradation and capitalist accumulation. We review recent literature engaging with nature and value theory to show how a narrow conception of nature perpetuates a capitalist “production bias” that inadequately accounts for the more-than-capitalist relations involved in reconfiguring natures for capitalist value production. We argue for a return to the foundations of green Marxism that cast environmental degradation as a crisis of reproduction and draw connections with critical scholarship on wasting and a corpus of radical Indigenous, Black, and feminist scholarship which understand the value of nature to originate in life-making. We do so in order to consider environmental degradation from the politics and uneven experiences of life-making – a term we use to signal the material reproductive relations capital appropriates; the persistence of these relations in degraded environments; and the existence of these relations independent of capitalism and capitalist value. Bringing these literatures in conversation, we recast environmental degradation as a crisis of life-making, a conceptual move we argue is necessary to properly account for the more-than-capitalist relations that give historical and geographic form to environmental degradation in late capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental degradation
• late capitalism
• value
• reproduction
• appropriation

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented as part of a panel series at the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting. We would like to thank the participants, as well as discussants Anna Stanley, Jesse Goldstein, and Matt Huber, for their generous engagement and insightful feedback. Thanks to Mazen Labban for his editorial guidance and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks. We are also indebted to Scott Prudham and the Political Economy and Ecology Working Group at the University of Toronto for the numerous opportunities to discuss and refine ideas presented in this paper. Any shortcomings are ours alone.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We use more-than-capitalist relations to refer to multiple hierarchies of difference, including patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism that devalue certain lives in ways that benefit the generation of capitalist value (see also Collard and Dempsey 2017). We prefer the non-dualistic qualifier “more-than-capitalist” over “non-capitalist” to denote the functional relation these hierarchies have to capitalism. Social, cultural, and political differences have historically shaped the conditions under which surplus value is produced and may be harnessed by capital accordingly.

2 Environmental degradation is referenced in this literature primarily in terms of impacts on nonhuman natures, while wasting scholarship in the final section mobilizes degradation primarily in relation to human lives. We have retained admittedly dualistic language when engaging with these literatures. Yet, by bridging these literatures and by centering interspecies life-making, we have sought to align our conceptualization of nature with ontologies that see human and nonhuman environments as co-constitutive.

3 Collard and Dempsey (2016, 2017) and Sullivan (2017) are notable exceptions.

4 We use the term “bias” to make visible the concentrated attention this scholarship has directed towards nature as a means of capitalist production. While a focus on production can be a deliberate analytical choice, we contend there is ground to be gained by relational analyses that expand our theoretical conceptions of nature (and its degradation) beyond production, both for value-theory scholars interested in the reproduction of capitalism and for those interested in the political stakes of reproduction in general.

5 See this work for an expanded critique of Marx's original primitive accumulation thesis (6-15).