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2021 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

14. Marx and the Environment

verfasst von : Desmond McNeill

Erschienen in: Fetishism and the Theory of Value

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

I first briefly reiterate the purpose of the book: to demonstrate the crucial role that the qualitative theory of value and the associated concept of fetishism play in Marx’s critique of the capitalist system. I next review the work of commentators on Marx and nature, concluding that it is capitalism, not Marx, that adopts a ‘Promethean’ attitude to the environment. I discuss proposals that have been made to extend or supplement Marx’s labour theory of value so as to include nature and the unpaid work of others. And I critique the concepts of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘nature as accumulation strategy’. Against this background, I examine Marx’s theory of rent, emphasising the distinction between two types of appropriation: the extraction of rent (by landowners from capitalists) and the establishment of exclusive private property over land, broadly defined. I conclude that, despite claims that “value is back on the agenda”, much of the recent literature that refers to Marx relates only peripherally to Marx’s theory of value which some, indeed, treat as erroneous or irrelevant.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Consumption, Need and Use-Value

Nächstes Kapitel Marx and Financialisation

This is supported by a Google search, which shows that writing on the environment is especially well represented.

As discussed earlier in this book, there is an important difference in ontological status between the various manifestations of fetishism. What appears to be the case with commodity fetishism is, in a sense, ‘real’.

I use this term interchangeably with ‘commodity fetishism’, although Schulz (2012) asserts, based on Marx’s original German text, that Marx used only the term ‘fetishism of commodities’.

Marx uses a variety of formulations to caricature such mystifying categories, suggesting that they are as meaningless as ‘yellow logarithms’, or have as little relation to each other as ‘lawyer’s fees, red beets and music’.

“It is not necessary … to scour Marx’s entire collective works in order to isolate his different treatments of nature. This painstaking and ambitious project has already been accomplished by Alfred Schmidt in his difficult but definitive study of The Concept of Nature in Marx” (Smith 2010[1984]: 32–3).

According to Smith, Marx does not make much reference to space, except in relation to use-value. He quotes Marx, concerning the transportation of people or commodities, wherein “a material change is effected in the object of labour—a spatial change, a change of place … and along with this goes a change in its use-value. … Its exchange-value increases in the same measure this change in value requires labour” (Smith 1984: 112). Other authors who have written on space from a Marxist perspectiveinclude Lefebvre (1991), Castells (1977) and Harvey (2008).

For example, Haraway (quoted in Malm 2018: 25) nature is “a powerful discursive construction”, it is “a trope. It is figure, construction, artefact, movement, displacement, Nature cannot pre-exist its construction.” (Haraway 1992: 298)

Late in his life, Marx took great interest in the work of the German agricultural chemist, Justus von Liebig, whom he quotes in Capital Volume 1, ch 15, footnote 246: “To have developed from the point of view of natural science, the negative, i.e., destructive side of modern agriculture, is one of Liebig’s immortal merits”. Recent work by Saito (2017) has made available previously unknown writing by Marx on this topic.

For discussion of Polanyi’s influence see also Prudham (2013).

With regard to unpaid labour, Moore draws in part on earlier work by Mies (1986).

There has even been proposed an animal labour theory of value, as noted by Foster and Burkett (2018).

It is clear that Marx was aware of the threat that capitalism posed for the environment. His analysis helps to explain its endless striving for profit and hence increased production. But one aspect that he fails to examine is the drive to ever-increasing consumption, which is the necessary corollary to production (ref Chap. 13). Some Marxist economists have addressed the issue, and most notably Fine (e.g. Fine and Leopold 2002; Fine 2017) who has developed a theory of consumption, inspired by Marx’s work, that demonstrates the power that producers exert over consumers. But this cannot be the whole picture; a fuller understanding of this (very social) phenomenon is required if the environmental challenge is to be effectively confronted.

According to Google scholar, usage of the term has increased about fifty times since 2006, two years after Harvey’s original article.

In support of his claim that this is a concept out of control, Das lists eight different applications, ranging from (1) the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; to … (8) usury, the national debt, and … the use of the credit system.

Or even ‘green/blue grabbing’ (Benjaminsen and Bryceson 2012).

He adds “The extraordinary complexity of state and regulatory procedures forcing the commodification of CO₂ exemplifies par excellence what Marx once defined as commodity fetishism” (Swyngedouw 2010: 220). This, I suggest, is a rather inaccurate interpretation of the concept.

As Harvey expressed it: The grapes that sit upon supermarket shelves are mute; we cannot see the fingerprints of exploitation upon them or tell immediately what part of the world they are from. “Christophers, like Castree (2001) has been inspired by Harvey and suggests “to apply the critique of commodity fetishism to the circulation of money” in a way that “should look broadly like the attempts that have been made to follow nonmonetary commodities and hence to trace their sociospatial backgrounds” (2011: 1075).

Adopting a similar approach, Hudson and Hudson (2003: 413) suggest that the alternative-trade movement “represents an initial attempt to counter the pervasiveness of commodity fetishism, working to make visible and relevant the social relations that underlie production and exchange”.

“the land on the one hand and labour on the other, two elements of the real labour process, which in this material form are common to all modes of production, which are the material elements of every process of production and have nothing to do with its social form” (Marx 1959: 591).

Marx writes that “Ground-rent might seem to be a mere form of distribution, because landed property as such does not perform any, or at least any normal, function in the process of production itself” (Marx 1959: 883). The phrase ‘or at least any normal’ seems equivocal.

Harvey (1982) elaborates on the issue of absolute rent, in relation to real estate.

And yet he also writes: “For instance, in the extractive industries, which must be clearly distinguished from agriculture, raw material as an element of constant capital is wholly absent, and even auxiliary material rarely plays an important role” (Marx 1959: 759) (my emphasis).

The “legal fiction by grace of which certain individuals have an exclusive right to certain parts of our planet” (Marx 1959: 634).

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Titel: Marx and the Environment
verfasst von: Desmond McNeill
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Fetishism and the Theory of Value
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-56122-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-56123-9

Copyright-Jahr: 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56123-9_14