Phil,
No, I don't think I'll "just go away." instead, I will make this statement
once more, in a different way.
Marx never conceived of Nature in any way other than as a subject of man's
labor. He never considered it as a system within which man was only an
element other than to state the obvious. Whenever "Nature" or "earth"
appear in Marx's writing, it is in connection with human labor. He never
studied the process of the totality of human production as a process within
the totality of all other systems of energy and matter flows in which it is
involved. He did not consider that the products of nature had any value in
and of themselves and he never considered or talked about the non-consumible
output, the waste product of human activity. As illustrated in the citation
from the Grundrisse, Marx considered nature to be the passive element
confronting active human labor.
Of course Marx did not say the "God created the world for humans to enjoy"
but he did participate fully in the world view that nature was a store of
raw materials for human labor. Nature is subordinated to human labor,
"becomes one of the organs" of human labor (Capital, v1, Intl. Publishers,
1972, 179). Sticking to that context, the entire section titled "The
Labour Process or the Production of Use Values" clearly illustrates that
Marx accepted the idea that human labor subordinated Nature and thereby
extinguished nature leaving nothing of nature to form a determinate element
in the product; labor time determines value, as such, to reflect any
"ecological considerations", only some abstract, external valuation could
incorporate the relationship of human activity to its environment into the
determination of prices; but these would be artificial and abstract; e.g.,
shadow pricing, a la CB analysis and totally unlike value as an ideal as
explicated by Ilyenkov . Value would still only reflect labor.
Viz "natures storehouse", the translation of Capital that I have contains
the following:
"Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes
to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible.
As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house."
(ibid.)
Perhaps I saw a different translation elsewhere (I think he actually does
use the term "nature's storehouse in his writings on pre-capitalist social
formations collected in a Progress Publishers book of the same name). But
the meaning is the same. Elsewhere, he expresses the identical idea:
"The earth is the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and
material of labor, as well as the seat, the base of the community."
(Grundrisse, 1973, 472)
workshop, larder, toolhouse, arsenal = the idea is clear. But more
importantly, once the labor process has begun nature has no more role for
understanding the productive process which is the determinant element of all
social formations in Marx's theory of history. Marx considers neither the
materials extracted from "his original larder" nor the waste products
generated by human production. And while he mentions "great workshops",
"larders" and "arsenals" from which materials are drawn, he never mentions
"outhouses, toilets, privies, loos" or any other suitable metaphor for the
disposal of these waste products. This is very significant for evaluating
the presence (or absence) of ecological consideration.
The the discussion of rent relation in volume 3 of Capital is most
illustrative. In the section on the genesis of ground rent he argues that
absolute rent, that is rent that is paid for land which has no productive
value and therefor does not enter into the circulation of commodities
whereby value is realized (value=objectified human labor), is in fact a
social relation of production that derives from the articulation of the
capitalist mode of production with the pre-capitalist ones from which it
emerged. Thus even rent, which might express some way in which Nature could
be a source of value in his theory, provides no expression of the
relationship between human productive activity and the environment (Nature,
the earth) in which it takes place. Specifically he wrote concerning the
price of land: "Two elements should be considered here: on the one hand, the
exploitation of the earth for the purpose of reproduction or extraction; on
the other hand, the space required as an element of all production and all
human activity." (Capital, v.3, Intl. Publishers, 774). Notice that there
is no "long term" considerations of environmental degradation with a
corresponding impact on the system. We only have the "tendency of the rate
of profit to fall" as an element determining the long term trajectory of the
capitalist system. He never envisioned "ecological catastrophes" as a
consequence of industrial production.
Now perhaps a socialist economics could develop on the basis of socialist
relations of production in which these elements were incorporated but Marx
himself didn't provide the elementsfor such an economic theory. The
experience of all socialist countries shows that they have the same (or
worse) environmental record as the capitalist ones.
Since the laws of marxist economics (the theory of human production in
capitalist society, where production constitutes the determinant element of
all social formations) are incapable of reflecting the relationship of the
economy to the environment it is very difficult to see how it can form the
basis for an economics that reflects the relationship between the human
species (as a species whose species nature is labor) and the environment.
Quite simply, the environment/nature has no place in marxist economic theory
except as the source of the means and material of labor. How then do we get
an ecological economics out of Marx's theory as it stands?
Furthermore, no one has ever commented that Marx did any gardening or even
grew a house plant, which is unusual considering how big the brits are on
gardens (yes, Phil, I know he was a German but he didn't like Germany and
didn't live there except when he was a young man; it seems he had trouble
with the law). Perhaps his general negative attitude toward nature is also
reflected in his position on the peasantry which he saw as a reactionary
force. A general bias against all things natural; I'll bet he even got
scared walking in the wild woods.
Paul H. Dillon
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