Marx and the Climate Crisis #1: Marx and Nature by Sean O’Brien
Marx and Nature
This four-part lecture series asks what we can learn from Marx about the climate crisis: its origins, its impacts, and what possible solutions we might seek in the face of increasingly inadequate government efforts to mitigate the escalating devastation worldwide. Developments Marx criticized in early industrial capitalism have had enormous consequences for the planet’s eco-systems, not least in the form of carbon-fuelled climate change. But a century and a half has passed since the early industrial period. What could Marx have to teach us about environmental crisis in the twenty-first century? Was he not a developmentalist and leading proponent of industrial modernization? Did the socialist economies of the twentieth century not pursue a productivist model that churned out CO2 at rates on par with the capitalist world-economy? And what of China, an ostensibly communist country and one of the biggest polluters in the world?
These are important questions, no doubt, and over the course of this lecture series we will aim to address them and their implications for an environmental politics, but these lectures also aim to distinguish between Marx and the Marxist tradition, a school of thought to which Marx himself declared no affiliation. Indeed, when his son-in-law Paul Lafargue reported to him on the activities of French ‘Marxists’, Marx famously replied, ‘Je ne suis pas Marxiste!’ How might we open up this distance between Marx and the tradition of Marxism from our present vantage? Marx decried capital’s voracious appetite for natural resources, which he saw as part of its general tendency to leave ruin in its wake. But he also insisted that the tendency to degrade or exhaust the earth’s ecosystems was inherent to the capitalist valorization process, which, as he recognized, requires ever more material and energy throughputs to maintain not only its engines of economic growth but its rate of accumulation. Returning to the core categories of the Marxian critique of political economy and drawing on a range of ecological Marxist scholars and schools of thought, this lecture series will recover a green Marx worthy of our era of climate crisis.
Like the previous lecture series, ‘Marx after Growth’, the idea behind this series is to offer a public-facing, para-academic introduction to Marx’s work and debates in Marxian theory for Humanities students and scholars working in one facet or another of contemporary studies who might be familiar with some Marxist theory but haven’t yet had a chance to engage much with Marx’s ecological thinking or work that connects the critique of political economy to the climate crisis.This first lecture returns to Marx to recover his critical theory of nature, or more precisely society-nature relations, since for Marx modernity is distinguished by the social mediation of first nature by a fetishized ‘second nature’. The way we reproduce ourselves under capitalism, always in service to an abstract ‘economy’, limits our ability not simply to see our world for what it really is, but more pressingly to act in an ecologically sustainable way.
Just look at greenhouse gas emissions over the past couple of years. After a sudden drop during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, CO2 emissions rates soared to the highest levels ever recorded in 2021, only to be surpassed in 2022, despite years of mitigation efforts and policy initiatives across the advanced capitalist countries. Is this merely about greed? Certainly, trading in ‘carbon credits’, which effectively allows countries to buy increases in the carbon footprints of their national economies, is now one of the world’s largest and most profitable financial markets. As Jacob Blumenfeld has recently argued, if ‘climate denialism is no longer socially acceptable’, it is also ‘no longer necessary’ (2023: 172). A number of possible scenarios might follow from this insight, he notes, none of them necessarily radical or even progressive, from the market solutions called for by the representatives of green capitalism to the revanchist ethno-nationalisms of eco-fascist reactionaries. Why is it so difficult for modern society to meaningfully address climate change?
The concept of second nature is useful here. It’s associated with Georg Lukács, a foundational figure of Western Marxism and a major influence on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, though he was never an official member of the Institute for Social Research. Lukács first deploys the concept in his early work, The Theory of the Novel, where he uses the term to describe a state of affairs in which social customs and cultural values come to be naturalized such that humans cannot recognize them as products of their own creative activity. This naturalization of custom and convention estranges us from first nature, and second nature becomes a kind of prison:
Men are constantly smashing, replacing, and leaving behind the ‘natural’, irrational, and actually existing bonds, while, on the other hand, they erect around themselves in the reality that they have created and ‘made’, a kind of second nature which evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the case earlier with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the social relations which appear in this form). (1971: 128)
Caught in a world of bourgeois social relations, and largely unaware that this world isn’t in fact naturally given but is rather a product of our own creation, modern society finds itself trapped in a prison of its own creation, our ability to understand and act in the world constrained by this subjectively produced yet quasi-objective social structure, while first nature seems increasingly remote and strange, an alienated environment that we relate to as an external object. In this way, reason operates as a self-mystifying force, an idea that will be crucial for the Frankfurt School.
Drawing on the philosophical critique of the capitalist domination of nature developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as their student Alfred Schmidt, I want to explore their idea that ‘the dialectic of Enlightenment’ constitutes first nature as an external object open to ceaseless expropriation, exploitation, and depletion, a critique these figures would eventually extend to Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure and to the actually existing socialist national economies of the twentieth century. We will then consider some subsequent efforts to reclaim Marx for a Marxian ecology. In working through some of this material, we’ll consider eco-Marxist theories of what is often called the ‘metabolic rift’, as well as criticisms of the metabolic rift thesis from figures associated with the ‘production of nature’ school of thought, in order to lay the foundations for a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation that we will develop further in future lectures on topics including energy, climate, and environmentalism.
Marxist environmentalism emerged in the 1970s as a movement opposing the eco-modernist view that nature-society reconciliation can be achieve within existing social relations, insisting instead that radical change is needed if we are to meaningfully address environmental crisis. This early Marxist environmentalism drew on the ideas of the New Left, which pivoted away from the tradition of critical theory exemplified by figures like Lukács, Adorno, and Horkheimer. As Alexander Stoner argues, ‘while Marxist-oriented environmental sociologists were able to glean new ecological insights from Marx’s work, the Marx that has emerged in their hands is a domesticated political economist, not a critical theorist’ (2022: 90). This essay lecture series joins Stoner, Blumenfeld and other contemporary theorists in insisting on a return to the mature Marx of the critique of political economy to develop a critical theory of climate change.
To begin with, let’s look at some key quotes from the first volume of Marx’s Capital that offer insights into the ecological dimensions of Marx’s thought, and especially his critical theory of nature, which have been central to the development of various strands of ecological Marxism. In Volume I, in the chapter on the labour process and the valorization process, Marx writes that:
Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power. (1990: 283)
Marx argues the labor process, understood in a general sense, refers to the mediation between humans and the environment, and the ways in which, through this creative activity, both humans and nature are transformed. As Stoner summarizes, ‘Through productive activity, both subject and object are transformed simultaneously as labor is realized in its objectification’ (95). In the labour process, humans change both external nature and their own internal nature. Marx continues:
The labour process, as we have just presented it in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. (290)
The labour process figures here as a transhistorical constant for human society, at least insofar as all forms of human society participate in the transformation of the natural environment through their labour, and in doing so transform themselves as well. At first sight, this may appear at first as a neutral activity, but, as Adorno will argue, the domination of external nature leads to the domination of our inner nature and ultimately to the domination of other people.
For Marx, however, what’s at stake is the distinction between the labour process in general, and the labour process under capital, or what he calls the valorization process, which sets in motion great transformations in the structures of human society that are both irrational and destructive. One of his more well-known examples in this regard is his critique of modern agriculture, which he introduces in the concluding section of the chapter on machinery and large-scale industry:
Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. (637)
This passage has proved decisive to the development of what is known as the ‘metabolic rift’ analysis, about which more below. For the moment, note that the disturbance in the society-nature metabolism results not from the conscious actions of subjects, but instead stems from the blind operations of structural forces in the capitalist valorization process. He continues:
…all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker. (638)
Marx, like many others in his day, was concerned with the problem of soil exhaustion stemming from the second agricultural revolution, and he cites in this passage from Capital the work of German chemist Justus von Leibig, whose Agricultural Chemistry, published in 1862, would also be foundational to the work of eco-Marxist theorists associated with the metabolic rift analysis.
But what of Marx’s critical theory of nature? Let’s slow down for a moment and return to the idea of society-nature relations, and how they are developed in the philosophical thought of foundational Frankfurt School figures Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Nature, its domination by man and its disenchantment, as well as concepts like ‘second nature’ and ‘natural history’, all figure centrally in their work. In developing their critical theory, they draw on Marx to argue that Enlightenment—man’s liberation from nature—is always a double-edged sword. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with the claim that ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant’ (1). The Enlightenment project promised human emancipation from superstition, mythology, and, crucially for our purposes here, nature or the natural world. This emancipation was to be achieved with the help of reason and rationality.
Yet Age of Enlightenment didn’t do away with domination. Rather, the development of rationality over and against magical thinking in fact displaces domination from nature to humanity who then impose it back onto nature and onto others. Think of the development of modern energy systems. The harnessing of fossil fuels, for instance, raised productivity levels to unprecedented heights, made possible previously unthinkable forms of mobility and transportation, while also contributing directly to the climate catastrophe we now face. Nuclear fission poses a similar problem: it is both an energy source and a weapon of annihilation. Enlightenment always brings with it the possibility of its undoing and descent into barbarism. This is obviously a reductive version of their argument, but for our purposes I want to focus on this idea of the domination of nature. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the domination of external nature, its destruction in the name of progress, is tied directly to the repression of an inner nature by the calculating rationality of instrumental reason. Seeing external nature as meaningless beyond its capacity to satisfy our self-interest requires that our desires take shape in conformity with the economic activity of capital that expropriates the natural world.
Their argument proceeds from the idea of the ‘disenchantment of nature’, a notion rooted in ridding the world of superstition via the cultivation of reason and rationality. Disenchantment, they argue, should be understood as a historical process whereby we come to find natural things largely meaningless and wholly transparent, stripped off their mystery and symbolic significance. But this process of disenchantment, they claim, reenchants the world with a new form of mystification, as it encourages us to see the historically specific social forms of bourgeois social relations constitutive of capitalist modernity as natural. Nature thus becomes historical, while history appears as natural. The idea of nature as history is important for the early Adorno who understood natural history not in the classical sense of nature’s self-development from primitive chaos to rational order. Rather, his interest in the term is made clear by what he explains as the “idea of natural-history”: to comprehend an object as natural where it appears most historical and as historical where it appears most natural. The idea of natural-history, then, is the dialectic that can be extracted from a literal analysis of the term’s ambiguity: the history of nature is nature grasped as historical; natural history is the historical grasped as natural.
These ideas about nature will be developed further in the work of one of their students, Alfred Schmidt. Schmidt wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Adorno and Horkheimer in the late 1950s. It was later published in English as The Concept of Nature in Marx, translated by Ben Fowkes, who many of you will know as the translator of the Penguin edition of Vol. I of Marx’s Capital. There’s a quote that is misattributed to Marx in the promotional material for the Verso edition to The Concept of Nature in Marx but actually comes from a 2011 book called Why Marx Was Right by the British Marxist theorist and literary critic Terry Eagleton, in a section on Marx’s approach to nature, where Eagleton writes that ‘Human beings for Marx are part of Nature yet able to stand over against it; and this partial separation from Nature is itself part of their nature’ (233), an idea he suggests in a footnote is key for Schmidt, who he says offers a classical account on the subject.
In his preface to the English edition, Schmidt notes that his dissertation was ‘one of the first attempts to draw on the politico-economic writings of middle-period and mature Marx, in particular Capital and the so-called “Rough Draft” of the years 1857-59 [what we know as the Grundrisse] for a philosophical interpretation of Marx’s life-work’, in opposition to ‘the widespread Western European…tendency to reduce Marx’s thought to an unhistorical ‘anthropology’ centred on the alienation problematic of the early writings’ (2014: 9). For Marx, Schmidt argues, nature is ‘both an element of human practice and the totality of everything that exist’ (27). Likewise, ‘extra-human reality’, he writes, ‘is both independent of men and mediated or, at least, capable of being mediated with them’ (29). This dialectical relationship between nature and society rests on a concept of labour as both natural and social, an idea we find outlined by Marx above in distinction between the labour process and the valorization process, where the labour process takes on a particular social form under capitalism.
Schmidt’s analysis begins with what Marx calls capital’s ‘cell form’, the commodity, and with a focus not on its use-value but on the form of value Marx calls exchange-value, or ‘the commodity as embodiment of abstract human labour’, something ‘independent of any determination by nature’ (15). Later, in Chapter Two, on ‘The Mediation of Nature through Society and Society through Nature’, Schmidt develops this idea further, where he writes:
As a determinant of exchange-value, labour is abstract, general and undifferentiated; as a determinant of use-value it is concrete, particular and composed of many distinct modes of labour. The exchange value of a commodity has no natural content whatsoever. It is indifferent to its natural qualities because it is the embodiment of human in general measured by the time outlaid, and all the determinations of nature are extinguished in it. (65-66)
In other words, value, Schmidt writes, “is indifferent towards the stuff of nature” (74). As values, he argues, commodities “no longer incorporate the living interaction between men and nature, but emerge as a dead and thing-like reality, as an objective necessity by which human life is ruled, as by a blind fate” (68). However, because of the fetish character of the commodity, Schmidt argues, “the natural determination of the commodity appears as social, its social determination appears as an inherent natural determination” (68). In this way, he continues, “the use-value, which is a product of the direct exchange between man a nature, takes on an existence ... cut loose from any connection with its natural existence” (93). What does Schmidt mean by this?
As I discussed in the previous lecture series, while commodities have both a use-value and an exchange-value, value isn’t a physical attribute of the commodity. Marx jokes that ‘no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond’ (1990: 177). The abstraction from use-value effectively disregards the concrete materiality of a commodity, whether it’s a good or a service that is exchanged on the market. While a commodity has an exchange-value, value itself exists as a relation between commodities, and it is this ‘value-relation’ which renders commodities commensurable.
As something ‘purely social’, value is not empirically verifiable. You cannot point to it. It is rather ‘supra-natural’, something that ‘transcends sensuousness’ (163), as Marx writes in the section on ‘The Fetish-Character of the Commodity and its Secret’. And, as Marx insists, it is this attention to the form of value that distinguishes his own approach from that of classical political economy:
Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within this form. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These forms, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself. (173-75)
Whereas classical political economy took for granted these categories—value, commodity, labour, money, and so on—Marx argues that ‘the value-form of the product of labour… stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character’ (174, n. 34), which is why his work is not an correction to or development of political economy, but a critique of political economy.
Indeed, Marx writes, ‘It is one of the chief failings of classical political economy that it has never succeeded, by way of its analysis of commodities, and in particular their value, in discovering the form of value which in fact turns value into exchange-value. Even its best representatives, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, treat the form of value as something of indifference’ (174, n. 34). This critical aspect of Marx’s work, however, was largely neglected by traditional Marxists, who tended, like classical political economists, to treat capitalist categories like value and the commodity as natural and transhistorical forms. So we can make a distinction between a subterranean or ‘esoteric’ Marx, who offers a ‘radical critique of value as a form of totalising social mediation’ (2010: 97), as Endnotes writes, and an ‘exoteric’ Marx who has his legacy in the workers’ movement. This ‘traditional Marxism’ tends to affirm the labour theory of value as a universal truth in human society, insisting that labour is the substance of value, that value is embodied in the commodity, and that the magnitude of value embodied in the commodity is determined by the amount of labour socially necessary for its production. Like classical political economy, traditional Marxism never asks ‘why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product’ (Marx 1990: 174).
Traditional Marxism can be traced to Engels’ writings, especially his review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and his own text, Anti-Dühring, whose influence on the workers’ movement is difficult to overstate. The problem is that Engels gets a lot of Marx wrong, particularly with regards to the value-form. In his reading of the opening chapters of Capital, Engels argues that Marx’s presentation of value from its simple to its general form offers an historical account of the emergence and development of capitalism, leading Karl Kautsky to declare that Capital is ‘an essentially historical work’ (quoted in Elbe). Advancing a theory of history as a process of evolution in which human development mirrors that of the natural world, Engels’ historicist reading of Capital belied a bourgeois faith in progress and expressed a conviction that human society developed according to natural laws, culminating in a mechanistic doctrine of development rooted in a dogmatic historical determinism.
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, there was a flourishing of critical readings of Marx, particularly in the work of the Soviet economist I. I. Rubin, who recognized that ‘the theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx’s entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value’ (2008: 5). Along with Soviet legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis, Rubin emphasised the attention to form in Marx’s critique. Both would be executed by Stalin. After the First World War the workers’ movement passes through a period of crisis, and it is during this moment that George Lukács and other figures associated with Western Marxism emerge. Lukács called into question the notion that Engels’s work was adequately representative of Marx’s thought, arguing against the Marxist doctrine of ‘the objective laws of nature and society’ to insist that capitalism is ‘a historically specific form of social praxis’ (Elbe). Western Marxism, and especially the work of Frankfurt School critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, acts as something of an ‘intellectual bridge’ (Benanav and Clegg 2018: 1629) between the return to Marx that followed the Russian Revolution and what is later known as the German ‘New Reading of Marx’, which would initiate a critical return to Marx’s mature critique of political economy.
Adorno gave a series of lectures late in his career that were to prove decisive to this New Reading of Marx. Based on these late lectures, you have the emergence in the 1960s of what is known as Neue Marx-Lektüre, or New Reading of Marx, particularly in the work of two of Adorno’s students, Hans Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, who rejected the historicist and empiricist interpretations of Marx in favour of a critical reconstruction of Marx’s critique. Schmidt was also a student of Adorno’s around this time and was influenced by these debates in Marxian theory. As the title of his dissertation makes plain, Schmidt aimed to undertake a systematic exploration of the concept of nature in Marx’s mature critique. At the time, this was a rather unusual undertaking, for, as Schmidt notes in the introduction, ‘the concept of nature…appears at first sight to have a purely peripheral significance in Marx’s theory’ (15). The reason for this peripherality, Schmidt notes, is that, in analyzing the dual nature of the commodity as both use-value and exchange-value, Marx was concerned primarily with its exchange-value, which expresses its value as a determinant amount of socially necessary labour time and therefore, as Schmidt insists, has nothing whatsoever to do with nature.
Readers of Marx will be familiar with this idea that there’s nothing natural about value, contrary to what the classical political economists say. I discussed the categories of Marx’s mature critique at length in the ‘Marx After Growth’ lecture series, but to offer a brief overview that will suffice for our purposes here, let’s take a short detour through the opening argument of Marx’s Capital on what he calls the two factors of the commodity, use-value and exchange-value, as well as the dual character of the labour embodied in commodities and the ‘purely social’ character of value. Marx famously opens the first volume of Capital with the statement that ‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity’ (1990: 125).
So, what’s a commodity? Well, to start with, a commodity is a product or service that’s bought and sold on the market on the basis that it satisfies someone’s needs or wants. This useful characteristic of the commodity Marx calls its use-value. Simply put, ‘The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value’ (126). You might buy a cup so that you can drink from it or a bed in order to sleep in it. Use-value is therefore comprised of a commodity’s material characteristics—the shape and solidity of the cup, for instance, which allows it to hold and carry liquid—and so is a matter of its qualitative properties. Use-values, then, ‘constitute the material content of wealth’ in all societies, as Marx writes, ‘whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers of exchange value’ (126). In other words, a cup is a cup, whether it was made by a medieval craftsman or mass produced in a factory. But where its social form in a feudal economy might be a tribute or a tithe, in a capitalist economy it is a commodity, which has both a use-value and an exchange-value.
A commodity’s exchange-value is its quantitative aspect. That is, what you can trade it for on the market. For one cup, perhaps you can get a pair of socks. The exchange-value of a cup is thus a pair of socks. Or four knives. Or a hat. A commodity has many exchange-values. There’s an equivalence here between a cup, a pair of socks, four knives and a hat, insofar as they are all interchangeable amounts of something else. In other words, their exchange value must be a ‘form of appearance’, as Marx says, ‘of a content distinguishable from it’ (127). What is this something else, this ‘third thing’’ (127) as Marx calls it, that the cup and the hat have in common? It cannot be a matter of their material properties, since it is precisely the abstraction from use-value that renders these objects exchangeable, an abstraction that occurs at the moment of exchange. What’s left when we abstract from the useful, concrete, material properties of a commodity?
What’s left is that they are products of human labour, and not particular, concrete acts of labour—cup making or hat stitching—but ‘human labour in the abstract’, in Marx’s words (128). Whenever we abstract from the use-values of commodities in the act of exchange, Marx writes:
There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values. (128)
So, the value of a commodity is not the measure of an individual’s concrete, particular labour, but of ‘human labour in the abstract’, which is to say a social average, or what Marx calls socially necessary labour time, which is the average time socially necessary to produce a given commodity.
Labour in a capitalist economy therefore has a dual character. It is both concrete labour, or the particular form of labour that produces a cup, for instance, and abstract labour, or labour abstracted from its concrete particulars in the act of exchange. Marx notes that he was ‘the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities’, and states that ‘this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy’ (132). This category of abstract labour is crucial on several levels: it is distinct from the concrete particular activity of a given form of useful labour; it is a purely social determination, abstracted from the material properties of a commodity’s use-value; its existence is peculiar to capitalist society; and it is the source of value in a capitalist economy.
Ok, what is value? To explain this mysterious thing called value, Marx famously uses the example of 20 yards of linen, which for purposes of explication he says are worth one coat. Here, we are working with two commodities in isolation, linen and a coat, and it’s entirely arbitrary or accidental which commodities we use for this thought experiment. So, if 20 yards of linen are worth one coat, then the value of the linen is expressed in the form of a coat. The linen now has a ‘value-form’ distinct from its physical form as linen. The coat ‘represents’ the value of the linen, which exists only as a relation between the two commodities: Marx writes, ‘in the expression of value of the linen the coat represents a supra-natural property: their value, which is something purely social’ (149). Schmidt’s emphasis on the non-natural or ‘purely social’ character of the exchange-value of a commodity quite clearly reflects this line of thinking in Marx’s critique of political economy, as does his understanding of the capitalist form of the domination of nature.
Schmidt clarifies capitalism’s restructuring of the society-nature metabolism, comparing it with ‘pre-bourgeois forms of production, whose essence consists of personal relations of dependence between men’, relations ‘transparent enough to prevent labour and the products of labour from taking on “a fantastic form different from their reality”’, he argues, citing Marx (69). For Schmidt, this is also the basis of capital’s relatively autonomy from and indifference towards nature. ‘Under slavery and serfdom’, he argues, ‘there is basically no division between labour and its natural preconditions. Both moments merge to form an undifferentiated natural basis for the existence of the slave-owner or the feudal lord’ (81). With the development of capital, a new form of domination emerges, and with it the old identity between man and nature is lost:
This original and, precisely on that account, abstract identity of man with nature, goes so far that man not only appears as a mode of nature’s organic existence, but nature appears inversely as its own inorganic existence. With the emergence of bourgeois conditions of production, this identity changes into its equally abstract opposite: the radical divorce of labour from its objective natural conditions. (81-82)
Against both transcendental idealism and vulgar empiricism, Marx sees a world ‘ruled by abstractions’ (1993: 164), as he writes in the Grundrisse. The ‘phantom-like objectivity’ of value constitutes a form of objective domination, which Marx argues distinguishes capitalist society from other forms of class society such as ancient slave societies or medieval feudal societies.
In these forms of class society, one group is ruled by another in a form of direct or personal domination and dependency: the slave is the property of the master, the serf is bound to the feudal lord. Wage labourers, on the other hand, are formally free, and at least legally speaking are formally equal to the capitalist. There’s no personal relationship of domination or direct relationship of force. Modern capitalist society appears to be defined in opposition to earlier societies with their ‘caste privileges and personal relations of dependence’ (Heinrich 2012: 15). But it is precisely through this formal freedom that a historically distinct form of domination emerges: the spectral objectivity of the value-relation corresponds to a form of objective domination or impersonal compulsion.
In other words, nobody puts a gun to the head of a wage labourer and forces them to work. Workers, it would appear, freely enter into a contract and are free to leave one job for another within the bounds of the contract. In reality, however, proletarian freedom is the freedom to work or starve. Workers in capitalist society are ‘free in a double sense’ (1990: 272), as Marx puts it: free from the direct domination of the feudal lord, for instance, but also ‘free’ of the means of subsistence. As I discussed in the previous lecture series, the process of proletarianisation formally and legally separates workers from the means of subsistence and renders them radically dependent on the wage for survival. Workers are thus compelled not through a personal relation of dominance but by the objective conditions of their existence to seek wage work in order to survive. And capitalists too are subject to this form of objective domination.
Capitalists are compelled to put the profit motive above any other concern if they wish to survive in the market. Profit seeking is therefore not a moral failing, and indeed there’s no moral opprobrium in Capital. Capitalists are by necessity forced to adopt competitive measures or face bankruptcy. As Michael Heinrich puts it, ‘capitalism rests upon a systemic relationship of domination that produces constraints to which both workers and capitalists are subordinated’ (2012: 16). We can therefore see how the work of figures like Adorno and Schmidt, among others, might offer the building blocks of what Blumenfeld describes as ‘a critical theory of climate change’ that can ‘move beyond the moral condemnation of “greedy” individuals and corporations for ruining the planet, and instead approach the question from the perspective of social form, that is, the specific ways in which the form-determinations of capital, value, money, and the commodity practically invert our relation to ourselves and nonhuman nature’ (165).
But other figures associated with ecological Marxism such as Paul Burkett have criticized Schmidt’s reading of Marx. While Burkett finds much to praise in Schmidt’s work, he argues that ‘Schmidt’s reconstruction becomes more problematic when he converts capitalism’s specific, socially determined relation to nature—especially its exploitative use and development of natural forces as mere material conditions of capital accumulation—into a natural law of social evolution’ (1997: 168). This leads, in Burkett’s account, to a ‘deformed interpretation of Marx’s communism’ (168). Consider the following passage from Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx:
The new society is to benefit man alone, and there is no doubt that this is to be at the expense of external nature. Nature is to be mastered with gigantic technological aids, and the smallest possible expenditure of time and labour. It is to serve all men as the material substratum for all conceivable consumption goods…The exploitation of nature will not cease in the future but man’s encroachments into nature will be rationalized. (155-156)
For Burkett, this characterization of Marx’s vision of communism is a distortion because Schmidt ‘never considers how in Marx’s vision the people-nature metabolism is qualitatively transformed by the disalienation of workers vis-à-vis the conditions of production’ (170). To substantiate his argument, Burkett quotes part VI of Capital, Vol. III, on ‘Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent’, where Marx writes:
From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man over another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias [the ‘good family fathers’ of ancient Roman law], they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. (1991: 776)
Along with John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues Richard York and Brett Clark, Burkett is considered a leading figure working in the tradition of ‘metabolic rift’ analysis. His own work—in Marx and Nature, for example—departs most immediately from Marx’s comments on metabolism and subsequent work on the concept of ‘metabolic rift’, especially that of Foster. Foster’s work foregrounds the idea that the relationship between man and nature is metabolic in structure, and that capitalism introduces a rift into that metabolic relationship. As we’ve seen, at the heart of Marx’s conception of human society is an idea of the necessity of a physical relationship with the environment and an ongoing interaction with external nature. Metabolism, a concept from early nineteenth century cell physiology, not only allows Marx to conceptualize this interaction with nature, but also provides a means to situate capital in relation to both human social reproduction and the environment through the idea of social metabolism.
Social metabolism refers to the human labour process in general: the process of production is a social metabolism between human beings and nature, whereby human beings transform nature and their own relations to the natural world beyond themselves; it is, in other words, the mode of mediation between human beings and the rest of nature. If the universal metabolism of nature refers to all of nature, then, of which human beings are a part, the social metabolism refers to the specific productive relation of human beings to nature. The metabolic rift therefore names the irreparable rift in the interdependent processes of social metabolism brought on by capitalist production, or, in other words, capitalist production puts the social metabolism of the labour process in conflict with the universal metabolism of nature.
For a few decades now, the theory of metabolic rift has been, arguably, the most prominent line of Marxist inquiry into environmental crisis. More recently, however, the metabolic rift school has come under criticism from figures associated with what is called the ‘production of nature’ thesis, particularly in the work of Jason W. Moore, whose work builds on that of Bruno Latour and Neil Smith to argue against the existence—both conceptually and materially—of any distinction between nature and society. In his influential essay, ‘Nature as Accumulation Strategy’, Marxist geographer Neil Smith argues that ‘many Marxists and critics alike have argued that human societies generally, and capitalism in particular, attempt a certain “domination of nature”’ (2007: 24). ‘For the Frankfurt School’, Smith writes, citing Schmidt’s work in particular, ‘this was always conceived as an inevitable condition of the human metabolism with nature’ (24). Here he agrees with Burkett’s critique of Schmidt, who, as Burkett argues, equates the capitalist domination of nature with human nature as such.
For Smith, ‘There is no question that the broad intent of science in a capitalist society is explicitly aimed at the domination of nature, but that project embodies an aggressive externalization of nature, as we have seen, and in different ways this externalization of nature is also embodied, whatever the degree of lamentation, in the domination-of-nature thesis’ (24). In other words, Smith is arguing that the ‘domination of nature’ thesis advanced by Frankfurt School theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer, as well as Schmidt, ends up reproducing the very externalization of first nature that they argue is a product of capitalist modernity. ‘The production-of-nature thesis, by contrast’, Smith argues,
not only assumes no such comprehensive domination but leaves radically open the ways in which social production can create accidental, unintended and even counter-effective results vis-à-vis nature. In political terms’, he continues, ‘the domination-of-nature thesis is a cul-de-sac: if such domination is an inevitable aspect of social life, the only political alternatives are an anti-social (literally) politics of nature or else resignation to a kinder, gentler domination. (24)
In recent years, Jason W. Moore has emerged as a leading theorist in the field of Marxist environmental studies. His work is indebted to Smith in arguing that nature is in fact something produced by capital, and that in reality nature does not exist as something external to human society. His basic thesis is that ‘capitalism makes nature’, and ‘nature makes capitalism’ (6). Of particular concern for Moore is the apparent binary, or Cartesian dualism in his words, that figures associated with the metabolic rift thesis assume exists between nature and society. In the introduction to Capitalism and the Web of Life, Moore argues that ‘The old language—Nature/Society—has become obsolete. Reality has overwhelmed the binary’s capacity to help us track the real changes unfolding, accelerating, amplifying before our eyes’ (2015: 5).
Foster has countered Moore’s characterization of the metabolic rift thesis, arguing that ‘there is no contradiction in seeing society as both separate from and irreducible to the Earth system as a whole, and simultaneously as a fundamental part of it. To call that approach “dualist” is comparable to denying that your heart is both an integral part of your body and a distinct organ with unique features and functions’ (2016). At stake for Foster is a reconciliation of society and nature through a shift from the capitalist expropriation of nature to the socialist appropriation of nature. Recently, however, Alexander Stoner and Søren Mau have both argued explicitly against any notion of an original identity between humans and nature. Stoner suggests that such a conceptualization, which is applied to pre-bourgeois social forms as well as the vision of socialist society advanced by figures like Forster, can only emerge in bourgeois society when this relationship is inverted, as labour is separated from its natural conditions. Drawing on the work of Moishe Postone, Stoner argues that ‘The fact that the original identity of humanity and nature can be and has been projected backward onto all of human history is itself reflective of capital’s specific historical logic – namely, its abstract generality’ (96).
In a recent book, Mute Compulsion, Mau argues that ‘the corporeal organization of the human being’ includes ‘extra-somatic tools’, which he describes, following Marx, as ‘bodily organs’ (2023: 97). In other words, Mau posits an ‘original cleavage between humans and the rest of nature’ (102) into which capital inserts itself as mediator in what Mau calls ‘metabolic domination’ (104). There’s much more to be said about these debates, but I’m afraid we’ve run out of time, so we’ll pick some of them up in subsequent lectures. If you enjoyed this lecture, please join us again next time when we’ll discuss Marx and energy. And if you haven’t already, please go and have a look at the first lecture series, ‘Marx After Growth’, which you can find online.
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