capital y clase.pdf

8/10/2019 capital y clase.pdf

1/33

http://cnc.sagepub.com/Capital & Class

http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5

The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0309816800072001022000 24: 5Capital & Class

Noel CastreeMarxism and the Production of Nature

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

Conference of Socialist Economists

can be found at:Capital & ClassAdditional services and information for

http://cnc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://cnc.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Jan 1, 2000Version of Record>>

at PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE on August 13, 2014cnc.sagepub.comDownloaded from at PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE on August 13, 2014cnc.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5http://www.sagepublications.com/http://www.cseweb.org.uk/http://cnc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://cnc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://cnc.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5.refs.htmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5.full.pdfhttp://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5.full.pdfhttp://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5.refs.htmlhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://cnc.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://cnc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://www.cseweb.org.uk/http://www.sagepublications.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/24/3/5http://cnc.sagepub.com/


2/33

5

MARXS RUMINATIONS ON NATURE were notoriouslysparse. Despite (or because of) this, Marxists havespent more than a century mining his texts in order to

piece together otherwise disparate, and often gnomic, commentsand asides on capitalism and nature. From Engels (1956) TheDialectics of Nature to Schmidts (1971) The Concept of Nature in

Marx to Reiner Grundmanns (1991a) Marxism and Ecologyand beyond,1 Marxs silence on the question of nature has been

decisively rectified. Consequently, the Marxist tradition nowenjoys a well-stocked library of concepts and arguments withwhich to articulate a theory of nature. That this should be so asthe twentieth century has given way to the twenty first isparticularly fortunate and appropriate: for in government,business and civil society worldwide nature is on the agenda asnever before. Whether it be the Greenhouse Effect, Dolly thecloned sheep or the Human Genome Project, it seems that naturehas become one of the privileged subjects of pre- and now post-millennial angst and aspiration. In light of this, the ongoingMarxist interest in nature represents a timely convergence oftheoretical developments with real world issues and events.

Marxism and the Production ofNature

by Noel Castree

This essay surveys a century of debate on the Marx-nature question.It seeks to expose, critique and reformulate a set of foundationalassumptions which, it is argued, have informed this debate. Threemain arguments are put forward. First, it is suggested that successiveattempts to expound a Marxian theory of nature have see-sawedbetween naturalistic and social constructionist positions. Second,as such many Marxist theories of nature are shown (ironically) to havemuch in common with forms of bourgeois and anti-bourgeoisenvironmentalism they otherwise oppose. Finally, as a way out of theimpasse of Marxian thinking on nature, a conception of the productionof nature is tentatively put forward.

at PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE on August 13, 2014cnc.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/http://cnc.sagepub.com/


3/33

Specifically, it holds out the promise of a Marxism which, througha critical analysis of capitalisms ecological impacts, can work ontwo fronts simultaneously: first, against the kind of bourgeoistechnocentrism (of which environmental economics is

emblematic) which suggests that nature can be successfullymanaged within existing socio-economic frameworks; andsecond, against the kind of radical ecocentrism (exemplified bymany deep green organisations like Earth First!) which suggeststhat a fast-disappearing first nature can be saved by revertingto non-industrial modes of production. By negotiating theseantinomies, such an ecological Marxism can (contra bourgeoisworldviews) show the folly of merely tinkering with capitalismwhile (contra more extreme green worldviews) also demonstrating

that any post-capitalist future cannot be based on a return tonature in itself .2

However, the conditions which will allow Marxism toactualise its considerable green potential are, not surprisingly,manifold and complex. Two problems loom large. First, there isthe obvious problem that environmental policy circles aredominated by neo-liberal thinking, while oppositional greenpolitics and action (as in green political parties, environmentalnon-governmental organisations and environmental new social

movements) has, understandably, often been detached fromthe debates over Marxism and nature because of the latterstypically academic nature.3 In the second place, considerableacademic debate still rages over the Marx-nature-capitalismquestion. For example, the exchange between Benton (1989,1992) and Grundmann (1991b), in conjunction with Burketts(1996, 1997, 1998) successive critiques, indicates that there is stillmuch disagreement over the meaning and ecological significanceof even core categories (like value). The well-stocked libraryof Marxian concepts and arguments on nature, to which Ireferred above, is thus heterogenous in its contents. In onesense this is all to the good, of course, since intellectualdisagreement is surely vital if Marx-nature debates are not toossify. But, on the other side, it does make it difficult to distil acoherent Marxian position on the question of nature that mightbe translated into practical action against the apologetics ofbourgeois policy makers and the well meaning but fuzzy logics

of radical ecocentrists.In light of these introductory comments, it may be thought thatthis essay seeks to address this theory-practice gap by (i) resolving

6 Capital & Class #72



4/33

some of the theoretical disagreements between scholars of theMarx-nature question over key categories like value and (ii) show-ing how such theoretical disquisition can be rendered less abstractand speak to a more practical form of eco-Marxism beyond the

ivory tower. Though such an endeavour would be a worthy (ifvery ambitious) one, my aims here are in fact rather different andslightly more limited. For it will be my contention that debates onthe Marx-nature question need, in at least one crucial respect, tobecome more rather than less abstract before they can usefullyinform (and learn from) a grass-roots ecoMarxism. This mayseem a contradictory, even perverse, claim. But I hope to makegood on it in three ways. First, I will argue that much of thepresent and past Marxian work on nature remains locked

(unwittingly) in a worldview which is ontologically, theoreticallyand politically disabling. For all the careful attention to specificconcepts,4 for all the erstwhile differences between extantinterpretations of the Marx-nature-capitalism nexus, I want tosuggest that at a higher level of abstraction many Marxianapproaches to nature operate, usually unconsciously, with a setof foundational presuppositions which are of questionableintellectual and practical value. In this respect, then, seeminglydifferent interpretations of Marx, nature and capitalism are in fact

unified by their common adherence to a set of paradigmaticassumptions which organiseand, importantly, circumscribethe field of debate. It will be my aim to expose and critiquethese organising assumptions.

Second, I will show that they are assumptions which,surprising and ironic though it is, most Marxian theories ofnature share with the bourgeois and radical ecocentricworldviews they otherwise oppose. At the most abstract level,therefore, if not at the level of specific concepts and arguments,much of the ongoing work on Marx and nature is ordered andenframed in ways not dissimilar to its establishment and greenrivals. Following the work of social theorist and critic of scienceBruno Latour (1993), I shall call this ordering frameworkmodern in his specialist sense of the word. For Latour, post-Enlightenment thought has been founded on what he callsthe Modern Constitution. This unwritten, but powerful,Constitution has set the basic terms of academic, social and

political debate in Europe, North America and beyond. Centralto this Constitution, he argues, has been the Nature-Societydualism. So pervasive it is taken for granted, this seemingly

Marxism and the Production of Nature 7



5/33

unquestionable dualism, Latour claims, has long facilitatedthe exercise of various forms of social power. By separatingNature and Society off into putatively independent realms, hecontends, it has become possible for various actors in various

situations to appeal to imperatives supposedly intrinsic toeither domain in order to authorise the implementation (or not)of specific courses of action with particular social and ecologicalconsequences. More controversially, in an attempt to underminethe seeming ordinariness and innocence of the Nature-Societydualism, Latour (ibid.) claimsto cite the title of perhaps hismost contentious bookthat in fact We Have Never Been

Modern. What he means here is that Nature and Society do notoffer solid hooks to which we might attach our interpretation

(ibid.: 95). In his view Nature and Society are specificallymodern constructs which conceal the reality of non-modernworlds in which what we label Nature and Society are constantlymixed and hybridised into what he calls networks and whatMichel Serres (1987) calls quasi-objects, quasi-subjects. Inan era of genetically engineered food, biomedical implants andchemically induced climate change, his conclusion is that we areentering the non-modern world without ever having really leftit (ibid.: 130).5

It may seem rather odd to cite Latours argument in prosecut-ing a case against Marxist treatments of nature. I say this because,as is well known, Marx and twentieth century Marxists have,precisely, contested natures separateness from society. Inparticular, Marxs critique of Malthusian reasoning about naturallimits to growthsince recapitulated and elaborated by Meek(1955), Harvey (1974), Wiltgen (1981) and Benton (1989)haslong served as a powerful vehicle for resisting social programmesenacted in the name of the supposedly ineluctable forces ofnature.6 I accept this. However, two other points warrantconsideration. First, notwithstanding the critique of Malthus, weshall see that some Marxist work has in fact reintroducednaturesputative separateness in other registers (cf. Burkett, 1998).Secondly, it is arguable that much of the Marxist work whichapparently abjures this separateness installs a thoroughgoingand equally problematicsocial constructionism. What wehave, then, is two modalities of work on Marx and nature, one

at some level naturalistic, one at some level anti-naturalisticand social through and through (cf. Hazelrigg, 1993). Theproblem, I will suggest, is that neithermodality is satisfactory




6/33


7/33


8/33

Nature and Society

The nature-society dualism remains entrenched in both academicand popular thought and practice. Broadly speaking, it organises

two worldviews that have long been central to capitalist modernityand which commonly inform approaches to nature ingovernment, business and civil society: namely, technocentrismand ecocentrism. Let me stress that I use these terms in adeliberately heuristic and schematic way, since this is not theplace to review in detail the many different strands of greenthought and practice. The worldviews they describe are thereforeideal types and in practice their outlines are often fuzzy andhard to detect.

Ostensibly the techno- and ecocentric worldviews are verydifferent, though they overlap in such centrist doctrines assustainable development and ecological modernisation. On theone hand, bourgeois technocentrism is anthropocentric. Ittypically prioritises instrumental reason and sees the controland manipulation of nature as a means to the end of human9

happiness and well-being. Technocentrism incorporatesconservative, Cornucopian and Promethean strands. The formerincludes neo-Malthusian authors like Garrett Hardin (1996),

who advocate drastic reductions in population and consumptionlevels because of natural limits to growth. The second strandincludes authors like Julian Simon (1997), who pointoptimistically to new and future natural resources for humanusage. Finally, the third strand of technocentric thinking includesagro-food companies like Monsanto who claim (in their question-able rhetoric) that the active transformation of nature is the pathto human (sic) well-being. By contrast, ecocentricsat leastthose at the radical end of the green spectrumplace naturerather than humanity first or else put both on an equal existentialand moral footing. They argue for natures inherent rights toexistence and campaign for more-or-less radical measures tocurtail destructive10 appropriations of nature, such as thoseassociated with capitalist industrialisation. From the moderateGreenpeace to the radical Earth First!, ecocentrism is eitherpartly or emphatically non-anthropocentric.

None of this is new. What is, however, worth emphasising is thatat one level the differences between technocentrism andecocentrism are more apparent than real. Odd as it at first sight




9/33

seems, the Sea Shepherds and Monsanto, Friends of the Earthand the people behind Dolly the sheep, actually have something incommon: they all, in their own specific ways, posit a separation,distinction or divide between the social and the natural, the human

and the non-human. More specifically, they all, again in specificways, tend to posit one or other side of this putative dualism as aprime ontological, causal and normative force in justifying theirarguments and guiding their practices. In recent yearsand not forthe first timeit is the natural side that has been increasinglyinvoked to ground various arguments and policies. Threemodalities of invocation loom large. One is very familiar andlong-standing: it is the pessimism inaugurated by Malthuss naturallimits to growth thesis which time and again reappears in

technocentric (and some ecocentric) discourse. A second modalityin which nature is hypostatised is also familiar and long-standing:namely, the romanticism of nature-in-itself which supports moreradical ecocentric rhetoric and practice. Finally, there is a morerecent form of nature-discourse in which natures limits are seennot la Malthusas barriers to human well-being but asimperfections which science and technology can correct andmanipulate. Among other things, the promotion of geneticallymodified crops by agro-foods multinational fits well into this

third category of earth talk (Dryzek, 1998: 1) in which the powersof society are seen as superior to those of a tameable nature.

As we know, Marxists have long opposed appeals to naturein order to legitimate particular courses of social action. Beginningwith Marxs critique of Malthus, the argument has long beenthat ideas that draw upon the authority of nature nearly alwayshave their origin in ideas about society (Ross, 1994: 15), aposition well summarised by Raymond Williams (1980) essayIdeas of nature. Of course, this has not disposed Marxists toavoid using the signifier nature, nor has it led them to necessarilyignore or devalue those things we call natural. On the contrary,as we shall see, a strong current of naturalism11 has long beencentral to many Marxist disquisitions on nature, particularly soin recent eco-Marxist contributions. However, following thecritique of Malthus, other Marxists have sought to tempersometimes very stronglythis more-or-less pronounced natural-ism. In so doing they have emphasised two things. First, that

appeals to nature are often ideological and serve to occlude thehistorically specific social processes and relations driving naturesappropriation. Second, and more emphatically, that at one level




10/33


11/33

contribution, one designed to extend historical materialismsreach into the natural, not just socio-economic, realm. There is,of course, doubt as to whether Marx would have concurredwith Engels position. Nonetheless, The Dialectics of Nature did

trace a line of continuity from Marx and Engels famous joint-statement in The German Ideology that matter underpins andprecedes human history and society. In the context of thepervasive nineteenth century idealism of Hegel, Kant and theirepigones, this axiomatic statement was anything but banal. Itaffirmed what Stanley (19978: 458) calls the ontology ofobjective nature at the expense of a worldview sublating natureto Spirit. Moreover, it did so in a way which was far from naive.Engels, recall, was as much an opponent of Malthusian natural

limits thinking as Marx was. The Dialectics of Naturewithall its talk of natures dialectical laws, its non-identity withhumanity and its relative autonomythus proposed a qualified,though still strong, naturalism in which the material worldpresented challenges and opportunities to the historically specificsocieties which appropriated it.13

After Engels, it took over seventy years for another significantstatement on Marxism and nature to appear. To be sure, manyearly and mid-twentieth century Marxists did write about nature

(see the useful bibliography provided by Stanley, ibid.), but nonematched the book-length contribution of Alfred Schmidt, whoseThe Concept of Nature in Marx appeared in English in 1971.Clearly, the historical conditions in which Schmidt was writingdiffered radically from those prevailing in Engels day. Unlike TheDialectics of Nature, The Concept of Nature in Marxwas scriptedin the context of a neo-Malthusianism arguably as intellectuallyand politically pervasive as the idealism which Engels hadstruggled against. Ehrlichs (1970) The Population Bomb, Hardins(1968) The Tragedy of the Commons and Meadows et al.s(1972) The Limits to Growth were all symptomatic of an era inwhich natures supposedly invariant capacities were argued toimpose absolute constraints on economic and population growth.It is unclear to what extent Schmidt was consciously respondingto this reactionary naturalismit was far more prominent inAnglophone than German circlesbut the fact remains thatThe Concept of Nature in Marxdissented from the strong (if, as

I said, qualified) naturalism of The Dialectics of Nature. Putdifferently, Schmidts work might be said to be the first full-blown social constructionist Marxian theory of nature.




12/33

Schmidts influential treatise, as is well known, assiduouslysought out and assembled Marxs scattered commentaries onnature. Contra Engels, he relegated those cases where Marxarticulates a full-blooded naturalismsuch as in the Holy Family

where Marx (1975: 46) states that Man (sic) has not createdmatter himself. And he cannot create any productive capacity ifthe matter does not exist beforehand. Against this, Schmidt(op. cit.: 27) insisted that Marx did not mean that this extra-human reality was to be understood ontologically in the sense ofan unmediated objectivism. By de-ontologising nature in itself,Schmidt not only contested Engels notion of a dialectics ofnature but also focussed attention on the social side of thenature-society relation. Relation is the operative word here

because Schmidt invoked the metaphor of metabolism tosummarise the Marxist view of nature in which labour (in boththe transhistorical and capitalist sense) becomes the flashpoint ofongoing society-nature interaction. More specifically, Schmidtreintroduced and reworked the Hegelian distinction betweenfirst and second nature to argue that Marx saw capitalism asresponsible for transforming environments on a scaleunprecedented in human history. This is not to say that Schmidtwas anti-naturalist: on the contrary, he did not reject the notion

of a non-social or pre-social nature altogether. However, hispoint was, first, that such a nature can only be conceived throughsocial categories and, second, that Marx ha[d] virtuallynothing to say about this nature-in-itself because nothing can besaid beyond the bare posit (Hazelrigg op. cit.: 117).

In this sense, Schmidts naturalism was present but verymuted. Indeed, ultimately it was so muted as to be altogethersqueezed out by a social constructionism in which capitalism isseen as responsible for remaking nature anew. As Schmidt (op.cit.: 61) put it in a particularly forthright statement:

[under capitalism] men (sic) change their own nature as they

progressively deprive external nature of its strangeness and

externality, as they mediate nature through themselves, and as

they make nature itself work for their own purposes.

Here, then, nature is seen as at once external to humanity but

also sublated to it through the motive force of capitalism. Stanley(op. cit.), in a recent critique, sees Schmidt as lapsing here into alatent idealism which under-states natures materiality. However,




13/33

it might be more accurate to see Schmidts position as a non-naturalist materialism (to coin a rather cumbersome phrase) inwhich it is societynot naturethat is the most importantmaterial realm.14

Indeed, soon after the publication of The Concept of Nature inMarx, another MarxistDavid Harvey (1974)encapsulatedand concretised this material social constructionism. WhereSchmidts treatise was only indirectly ranged against the pervasiveneo-Malthusianism of the early 1970s, Harveys germinal essayPopulation, Resources and the Ideology of Science directlychallenged this worldview in which positive and preventativechecks were justified in the name of a supposedly finite nature.Specifically, Harvey rejected the commonly accepted argument

that Over-population arises because of the scarcity of resourcesavailable for meeting the subsistence needs of the mass of thepopulation to insist instead that

there are too many people in the world because the particular ends

we have in view (together with the form of social organisation

which we have) and the materials available in nature, that we have

the will and the way to use, are not sufficient to provide us with

those things to which we are accustomed (Harvey ibid.: 274).

In this way, he sought to draw attention away from the limitspurportedly imposed by an intransigent external nature tosuggest, rather, that ecological limits were relative to the specificsocio-economic systems in place at any one time.

If, by the mid-1970s, a certain social constructionism was inthe air viz. the question of Marx, nature and capitalism, it did nottake long for the pendulum to swing back to the naturalismfavoured by Engels. Just after Schmidt and Harvey expoundedtheir arguments, Sebastiano Timparano (1975) published On

Materialism. Timparanos book was a polemic and his argumentsimple:

By materialism we understand above all acknowledgement of

the priority of nature over mind or, if you like, of the physical level

over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-

economic and cultural level: both in the sense of chronological

priority and in the sense of the conditioning which naturestillexercises on man (sic) and will continue to exercise at least for

the foreseeable future (Timparano, 1975: 34).




14/33

The reference to mind and levels was quite deliberate andexplains Timparanos apparent indifference to the neo-Malthusianism which Schmidt and Harveys works undermined.For the target of his animus was not the ecocatastrophists of the

early 70s but something much more internal to academic debateswithin Marxism: namely, the latent idealism (as he saw it) oftwentieth century Western Marxismof which Schmidt, withhis Frankfurt School background, was for Timparano a part.Specifically, Timparano objected to the denigration of theconcrete-real in Althussers then ascendant structural Marxism(hence the parodic reference to levels) and its symptomaticsilence on nature (see Smith, 1980). In the context of the mid-1970s, Timparanos reassertion of a Marxist naturalism thus

came as a far more cautious and less optimistic response to theenvironmental and population problems of that time than thoseoffered by Schmidt and Harvey.

The Marxian theory of nature which ended the century ofwork just prior to the most recent periodto be surveyed in thenext sectionwas Gerass (1980) Marx and Human Nature:Refutation of a Legend. In some ways, Geras returned to whereEngels began: by reasserting, at a rather abstract level, theontological primacy of nature. In this sense, his analysis was

also concordant with Timparanos. However, unlike the previousauthors discussed, he sought, as the title of his book suggests, toextend Marxs view of nature from external nature (i.e. theenvironment) to human nature. Here, then, Geras argued for aMarxian theory not just of a putatively separate naturefirst orsecondbut of a universalnature which includes human beingstoo as biological and embodied entities. Marshalling quotationsspanning the entire course of Marxs intellectual career, Gerassconcern was to refute the view that individuals were merely, oressentially, ensembles of social relations. Like Timparano, hisanimus was very much directed at developments internal toacademic Marxism. In the wake of Althussers theory of ideology,Geras argued that a wholly anti-naturalistic view of the subject wasas dominant in academic Marxist circles as it was pernicious. Theupshot, he contended, was to so radically historicise the humansubject as to make it virtually an effect of social relations.Consequently, for him a Marxist emancipatory project was

robbed of a universaland thus (supposedly) unifying andnon-divisivebasis for political action. In this sense, then, Gerasattempt to read Marx as a naturalist at the level of both nature




15/33

and humanity was arguably intended to give stabilising force toour (sic) praxis (Stanley op. cit.: 469).15

By the mid-1980s, debates on Marx and nature had thussettled into a recognisable pattern, however varied the individual

contributions might be. From Engels to Geras, a persistentantinomy emerges in which naturalism and social construction-ism battled it out, each de-emphasising those aspects of Marxswork highlighted by the other. This is true even for Gerass work,which may seem to be the odd one out in terms of the argumentI am putting forward. I say this because his advocacy of a Marxian

view of human nature may seem to have overcome the nature-society dualism by extending nature into the human realm.However, this extension merelygeneralisedthe dualism while still

remaining locked within its terms of reference. For if Geras wasnot to sublate the realm of the social entirely to nature, he had toleave room for a nominally separate society which wasunderpinned by both external and human (universal) nature. Soit is that the most recent round of debates about Marx, nature andcapitalismto which I now turnhave emerged out of a legacyof dualistic thinking, even if it has not always been acknowledgedor realised. As we shall see, these newer debates have donerelatively little to take us beyond the legacy.

EcoMarxism

By ecoMarxism I mean that growing corpus of work, largelyfashioned in the last decade, which seeks to read Marx as anactual or potential critic of capitalisms environmentalconsequences. The context for this work, as is well-known, is theemergence of a so-called global environmental crisis in the1980s and 90s. Where, over twenty five years ago, Harvey couldafford to turn the tables on resource scarcity and over-population thinking, recent authors have been much moreconcerned about human impacts on and in nature. Theirintention has been to reconstruct Marx along more eco-friendlyor eco-sensitive lines. This is not just because of Marxs relativesilence on nature. More emphatically, it is also because greencritics have tended to see Marx as little more than a Promethean

who, in reality, embodied the wider Enlightenment desire tosubordinate nature to humanity (Soper, 1991). I consider herejust three examples16 of this new genre of ecoMarxist work (for




16/33


17/33

once as transformations of values (value-formation andvalorization) and as transformations of materials and energy.His tack is to see labour-power as the medium in and throughwhich two systems with two rather different ordering principles

(ibid.: 204) interact and contradict. On the one side there iscapitalism, which is growth-orientated, form-driven andindifferent to qualitative issues as to the origin, type and impactsof the materials used in production. On the other side, Altvaterargues, is nature, whose logics are described by the laws ofthermodynamics, notably the conservation of energy and theincrease of entropy. Given, as he sees it, capitalisms liability todestroy the environments upon which social (labour valuedefined) wealth is based, Altvater argues that we should build into

the functioning of the economic system a series of imperativeswhich prevent ecological damage (ibid.: 213)imperativespresumably dictated by nature in some post-capitalist future.

OConnor and Altvater both point to capitalism as inherentlyanti-ecological. In so doing they also articulate a form ofnaturalism in which one system (economic) is underpinned andcontradicted by another (ecological). Reiner Grundmannthethird and final ecoMarxist author I consider in this sectionhasproposed a wider, and more constructionist, Marxian critique of

political ecology. In his Marxism and Ecology (1991a), and anessay in the New Left Review(1991b), Grundmann rejects theargument that Marxs critique of environmental degradationwas specific only to capitalism. His wider argument is that Marxfocussed on the differential impacts of specific technologies within whatevermode of production17as they are embeddedin and against nature. Unlike OConnor and Altvater,Grundmann also rejects the idea that given technologiescontradict a putatively independent nature. For him (ibid.:113), ecological problems arise only from specificways of dealingwith nature. Moreover, he insists that this specificity can only begrasped anthropocentrically such that the real issue is not theabuse of an external nature but, instead, how to rationally andconsciously control nature according to human needs and values.As he puts it (1991a: 2), anthropocentrism and mastery overnature, far from causingecological problems, are the starting-points from which to address them.

There is much to commend in these and other ecoMarxistcontributions. OConnor, Altvater and Grundmann each, indifferent ways, rise to the environmental challenge of the new




18/33

century. Moreover each, again in different ways, provide avaluable corrective to a good deal of the technocentric and theecocentric thinking which currently animates the environmentaldebate. Against the former, OConnor and Altvater question

whether environmental problems can be dealt with simply bycorrecting the marketas environmental economics would, forexample, have itand argue instead for a wider, ecologicallycharged critique of capitalism, while Grundmann questions theoptimism usually associated with technological development.At the same time, all three authors take the ecocentric concernwith nature seriously, but do not lapse into any straightforwardcelebration of nature tout court(especially Grundmann).18 And

yet, as I intimated in my introduction to this essay, ecoMarxism,

like the preceding work on Marx and nature, shares somethingwith the bourgeois and green views of nature it otherwise opposes:namely, an ontological, theoretical and normative separationof the social and the natural realms. In OConnor and Altvater anaturalism is posited in order to highlight how the two realmscontradict; in Grundmann, by contrast, a constructionism isposited as the material and discursive basis through which naturecan and should be consciously and safely controlled. In otherwords, the recent ecoMarxist work still locks Marxism into a

worldview in which either nature or society (or even both) can beappealed to in order to ground arguments and justify particularcourses of action.

Benton: a limit case of Modern thinking?

There is, however, an exception to this dualistic rule. Ted Benton,an ecoMarxist whose work I wish to consider separately, hasarguably gone the furthest in undoing the binary suppositionsstructuring ecoMarxism. By implication, his work also conteststhe dualistic mind-set animating the earlier work of Engels,Schmidt, Timparano and Geras. Although some, like Grundmann(1992), have criticised Benton for favouring the nature side ofthe nature-society relation, I want to suggest that his work in factrepresents a limit case of Modern thinking about nature from aMarxist perspective. In other words, more than perhaps any

previous author, Benton has pushed Marxian thinking on natureas far as it can go while still remaining within the ModernConstitution disclosed by Latour.19




19/33

Like OConnor and Altvater, but unlike Grundmann, Benton(1989, 1991a, 1992) argues that capitalism has a specific liabilityto generate environmental crises on both the input (resource) andthe output (pollution) side. He spends considerable time re-

constructing Marxs notion of the labour process (at both thegeneral and historically specific levels) in order to derive a set ofecoMarxist concepts adequate to grasping capitalisms dependenceon, and transformation of, nature. I say reconstructing, becauseBentons argument is that the naturalism of Marxs philosophy ofhistory was not carried through to his economic theory ofcapitalism in whichincorrectlyhe tended to over-emphasisethe transformative capacities of capitalist labour.

This is all very interesting and worthwhile (if controversial in its

details: see Burkett, 1998). However, it is Bentons more generalview of the society-nature relation which I want to focus on here.In this area Benton is arguably far more helpful than most of thepresent and past commentators on Marx and nature I haveconsidered. On the one hand, Benton presents a very strong caseagainst what he (1989: 52) calls natural limits conservatism inthe Malthusian and neo-Malthusian mold. To this extent, he iscareful to abjure a naturalism based on a supposedlyfixednaturewhich, ineluctably, places constraints on humanity at some given

point. On the other hand, however, Benton also argues that a full-blown Marxian constructionismin which humanity can treatnature as a tabula rasais both naive and theoretically dangerous.Indeed, he regards it as a utopian over-reaction to natural limitsconservatism which, while understandable, goes too far in theother direction. If, then, neither naturalism nor constructionism willdo, Bentons alternative is to fashion a both/and position whichresorts to neitherside of the nature-society dialectic:

What is required is the recognition that each form of social/economic life has its own specific mode and dynamic of inter-relation with its own specific contextual conditions, resourcematerials, energy sources and naturally mediated unintendedconsequences The ecological problems of any form ofsocial and economic life would have to be theorised as theoutcome of this specific structure of natural/social articulation(ibid.: 77, emphasis added)

As Benton (ibid.: 78) goes on, this relativisation of both thesocial and the natural, encapsulated in the motif of articulation,




20/33

avoids both the Scylla of epistemic conservatism and the

Charybdis of social constructionist utopianism. Each form of

social and economic life is understood in terms of its own specific

contextual conditions and limits. These conditions and limits

have real causal importance in enabling a range of social practicesand human purposes which would not otherwise occur, and

also in setting boundaries and limits to their sustainability.

This middle position between the antinomies of naturalism andconstructionism is persuasive and intellectually appealing (see alsoBenton, 1994). It certainly stands as an advance over the see-sawcharacter of previous writings on Marx and nature and offers aninventive way forward for future historical-materialist work on

nature. However, in terms of the argument I am developinghere, Bentons approach, while it takes us quite far, still doesnot take us far enough. I say this because his argument stilloperates within the parameters set by the nature-society dualism.Although it represents a particularly subtle attempt to subvert thedualism by resorting to the metaphor of articulation, itnonetheless still instantiates the image of two systems, oneeconomic, the other ecological, which interact, albeit now inhistorically specific and relative ways. Symptomatically, the

inspiration for Bentons third way solution for Marxianinvestigations of nature is the Transcendental Realism of RoyBhaskar and others. I say symptomatically, because Bhaskarholds to a naturalismto be sure, highly qualifiedin which adepth-model is employed to argue that basic chemical andphysical laws and processes always underpin the social. At thesame time, he also distinguishes the social and the natural at theontological level (see Collier, 1994: Pt. I).

For these reasons, it seems to me that Bentons position onnature is a limit case of Modern thinking in Latours sense of theword. Put differently, while its non-dualistic intentions are soundand to be commended, in practice it nonetheless feigns toovercome the society-nature binarism without ever quite doingso. As Latour (op. cit.: 55) puts it, in a statement which could havebeen written as a direct critique of Benton,

To resort to dialectical reasoning [is] is no way to exit out of

the difficulty Linking the two poles of Nature and Society byas many arrows and feedback loops as one wishes does not

relocate the quasi-objects or quasi-subjects




21/33

However, the problem with Latour is that his diagnosis of Marxismis only partly, rather than entirely, correct. While, as I have shown,many Marxian theories of nature are indeed Modern in his sense,others are arguably not. How, then, to fashion a non-Modern

Marxian theory of nature which resorts to neither naturalism,constructionism nor, even, to Bentons attempted synthesis?20 Byway of an answer I now want to turn to a body of work on the

production of naturethus far little discussed in wider debates onMarx and naturewhich offers the potential to take those debatesbeyond the debilitating nature-society dualism.

The production of nature

Marxian work on the production of nature emerges out of thediscipline of geography. This is noteworthy in two respects. First,it arguably explains why this work is little known in Marxistcircles, since geography, which occupies a relatively marginalplace in the academic division of labour, has rarely figured inwider intellectual debates in the twentieth century (see Soja,1989). Second, and more positively, the geographical provenanceof the production of nature argument is also apt because geography

has long been distinctive as the supposed bridging disciplinebetween the natural and social sciences. It is not for nothing,then, that Marxist geographers have long placed nature at thecentre of their theoretical endeavours. As we shall see, theproduction of nature argument is original and provocative insofaras it refuses the nature-society distinction which has organisedgeography as much as the technocentric, radical ecocentric andMarxian views on nature to which I have already referred.

Work on the production of nature originates with, and isindeed largely synonymous with, the writings of Neil Smith(1984; 1996; 1998).21 However, in his most recent work DavidHarvey (1996) has qualified his earlier muted (even anti-)naturalism and now seems sympathetic to the production ofnature thesis. Smiths writings begin with his Uneven Development(1984), which proposes a geographically inflected Marxiananalysis of capitalism. Among other things, Smiths concernwas to undermine the nature-society dualism as it appeared in

both academic and everyday thought. Academically, Smithdetected this dualism in the bourgeois natural science inauguratedduring the Enlightenment, romantic reactions to it (in philosophy




22/33

and literature) and also in most Marxist theories of nature.Considering both Schmidt and Timparano, Smith (ibid.: 30)concluded that neither takes us beyond the dualistic treatmentof nature. Likewise, he detected this dualism in the discourses of

both what he (1996: 40) has called the new environmental policyestablishment and its more deep green opponents. Indeed, heargued that seeing nature as independent from society, in howeverqualified a way, amounts to an ideology of nature which obfuscatesthe real nature of nature under capitalism.

In what does that real nature consist? Smith concedes thathumanity in general and capitalism in particular cannotproduce, say, geological strata or the atmosphere. However, hispoint is that conceptually and practically it is not possible to

comprehend such first nature as remains today in non-socialterms. Nature is thus always already socially delimited. To thisextent, Smith shares with Schmidt, Harvey and Grundmann astrong streak of anthropomorphism. Secondly, Smith also insiststhat nature at the end of the twentieth century is increasingly asecond nature which is produced within, and as part of, anincreasingly global capitalist system. As Adorno and Horkheimerfamously put it, capitalism has always been one big racket innature. However, in the fifty years since they wrote these words

this has become even more true. Indeed, Katz (1998) hasidentified something like an epochal change in the capitalistrelation to nature at the millennium. Where, for much of thecentury, capitalism has continued to push outward in theappropriation of an extensive nature, today it turns increasinglyinward to further transform an already socialised intensivenature in which the commodification of everything from plantgenes to human organs indicates natures deep remaking withinthe circuits of capital (see also Escobar, 1996). As Smith (1998:272) laconically puts it, nature is far more malleable than everit was [before].

What, then, does it mean to talk of theproduction of nature?Like the Marxist constructionisms discussed earlier, it is intendedto oppose the idea of an independent, non-social nature. AsSmith (ibid.: xiv) remarked, the production of nature

sounds quixotic and jars our traditional acceptance of what

had hitherto seemed self-evident it defies the conventional,even sacrosanct separation of nature and society, and is does so

with abandon and without shame.




23/33

Indeed, Smith coined the phrase as a complement to HenriLefebvres (1991) deliberately counter-intuitive notion of TheProduction of Space, space being another realm long consideredto be pre-given and beyond the scope of social alteration. Of

course, Smith is quite aware that Marx himself never talked of theproduction of nature in the sense that he means it. Indeed, for thisreason Smith chooses not to undertake a detailed analysis ofMarxs various comments on nature. His point, rather, is that theproduction of nature argument can be logically derived fromMarxs political economy. At base, Smiths notion of productionis remarkably simple. Utilising a rather orthodox reading ofMarxs political economy in which form (value) dominates overcontent (use-value, concrete labour), he suggests that capitalism

does more than merely interact with, appropriate or evenarticulate with nature. Rather, Smiths much stronger thesis is that

The development of capitalism involves not just a quantitative

but a qualitative development in the relation with nature. It is not

merely a linear expansion of human control over nature, an

enlargement of the domain of second nature at the expense of the

first. With the production of nature at a world scale, nature is

progressively produced from within and as part of the so-called

second nature (Smith, ibid.: 54).

In other words, under the growth-orientated, competitive andlabour-value orientated conditions specific to capitalism, natureitself becomes internal to the economic system. Simplifying, thisinternalisation takes two forms, namely intentional production(as, for example, with GMOs) and unintentional production(as, for example, in the new ecologies created unintentionally byaquatic, terrestrial and atmospheric pollution). The key to thisinternalisation is that naturethe varied realm of use valuesbecomes embroiled in the logic of exchange value on the worldmarket. On the basis of this bold, and strikingly simple,proposition concerning natures production, Smith then putsforward a theory of uneven developmentin which various sociallyproduced natural landscapesagrarian, forest, mineral etc.become subject to twin forces, internal to capital, of geographicalequalisation and differentiation (for more on this see Smith,

1986 and McIntyre, 1992). In Smiths vision, then, capitalistproduction is not only pivotal, it also involves far more than isimplied by the narrow empiricist notion of production as that




24/33

which occurs in the labour process/workplace alone (Smith,1998: 277-8). Following Marxs richer, more expansive definitionin the Grundrisse, Smith understands production in a muchwider sense as the whole global-local system of production,

including distribution, exchange and consumption.At first sight, the production of nature argument may seemlittle different from the Marxian constructionisms describedearlier. Indeed, to the extent that Smith prefers the semanticallyemphatic term production to describe the capitalist relationto nature his argument might be seen as hyper-constructionist,discounting nature as such even more than previous Marxistslike Schmidt did. As a corollary, the notion of the production ofnature might also seem dualistic insofar as the explanatory arrows

apparently point in one direction only: from capitalism to nature.However, I want to suggest otherwise. In fact, I want to suggestthat Smiths production of nature thesis offers a way to thinkbeyond the either/or of constructionism/naturalism. Morespecifically, I want to suggest that this non-dualistic conceptionallows Marxists to adhere to three things simultaneously: first, anontology which, while it denies a separation between capitalismand nature, nonetheless refuses to elide one with the other;second, a supple, non-determinist theory which, in explanatory

terms, accords power and agency to both capital and nature;and third, a normative perspective which criticises the ecologicalimpacts of capitalism on historically- and place-specific groundswithout reverting to a politics of nature in or for itself. These threethings, it seems to me, are the rewards to be had once one rejectsthe antinomian thinking informing previous work on Marxismand nature.

Clues to Smiths non-dualistic ontology are found in thefollowing declarations, drawn randomly from Uneven Develop-ment: [under capitalism] the development of the materiallandscape presents itself as a process of the production of nature(p. 32); [the task] is to renovate our conception of nature in suchas way that the dualistic world of bourgeois [and deep green]ideology can be reconstituted as an integrated whole (p. 32); theunity toward which capitalism drives is certainly a materialistunity but it is not [simply] the physical or biological unity of thenatural scientist. Rather it is a social unity centred on the

production process (p. 57). Process, unity, integrated whole these terms are rich in their meaning and indicative of the coreassumption underlying Smiths argument: namely, that the




25/33


26/33

they are, in short, ontologically irreducible. But this does not, inturn, lead Smith back to a dualistic worldview: for his point is thatin practice capital and nature interleave in diverse ways that altertheir putatively separate existences.

So far so good. But none of the above helps us adequatelyaddress less philosophical and more theoretical questionsconcerning causality and agency in the capitalism-nature nexus.This brings me to the recent work of David Harvey, a writerwho, as I noted, was very much an anti-Malthusian construc-tionist when first writing about capitalism and nature in theearly 1970s. However, in his more recent worknotablyJustice,Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996)he hastempered his former anti-naturalism and conceded that

capitalisms ecological and corporeal effects cannot be ignored.What is interesting, though, is that this switch has beenaccomplished without recourse to binarist thinking about thenature-capitalism nexus. Echoing Smith, Harvey (ibid.: 149)seeks to approach this nexus by escaping from the stasis of aswinging pendulum of opinion viz. naturalism orconstruction-ism. Instead, therefore, of considering what capitalism does tonature or vice versa, Harvey insists on two things. First, that wetalk about created ecosystems which both instantiate and reflect

[capitalism] in contradictory ways (ibid.: 185). Andsecond, that we understand capital-nature nature relations asintensely internally variegated (ibid.: 183): that is, as multiple.Let me take each claim in turn and illustrate its theoreticalimportance.

First, the notion that today most aspects of nature are at somelevel created seems only too suggestive of Harveys position onnature in the 1970s. But, despite appearances, Harveys point isthat these created ecosystems, while intentionally and un-intentionally produced by capitalism, possess causal powers oftheir own and take on agency in relation to the capitalist processesof which they are a medium and outcome. To phrase all this inSmiths language, nature may indeed be produced but producednature, in turn, cannot be exploited indefinitely: it has amateriality which cannot be ignored.23 Second, followingthrough the implications of Smiths argument that nature-capitalrelations are internal, Harveys insistence that these relations are

also intensely differentiated by time and location is theoreticallyilluminating. Among other things, it gets Marxists away from theproblematic habitso typical in previous Marx-nature debates




27/33

of making general or plenary statements about capital-naturerelations. In a world where capital commodifies everything fromtrees in Clayoquot Sound to wildlife in the Okavango to humanbodies in medical clinics, it is simply wrong to argue that capital is

either wholly anti-ecological or wholly able to exploit naturewithout limit. Rather, as Whatmore and Boucher (1992: 168) putit, natural relations are always embedded and thereby interactwith, and condition, [capitalist] social relations to varyingextents and in different ways in specific times and spaces. Or, inFitzsimmons and Goodmans (1998: 204) terms, dissolving theabstractions of nature and [capital] allows for a necessaryheterogeneity of outcomes and possibilities for transformation.The capitalist production of natureswhich, strictly, we need to

talk of in the pluraltherefore means that inparticulartimes andplaces in relation to particular environments capitalism isecologically harmful whereas in others nature is produced in waysthat have positive social and ecological effects (where the termsharmful and positive are, of course, always and ineluctably definedin specific value-laden ways). It all, as they say, depends.

These theoretical-explanatory gains are important and useful.They suggest a perspective on nature-capitalism relations inwhich causality and agency is complex, relative and contingent:

in short, difficult to generalise about. But these gains are notthe only ones. In addition, the non-dualistic assumptionssupporting the production of nature argument also generatenormative pay-offs. Four strike me as particularly important.Most obviously, the production of nature perspective circumventsforms of Marxian thinking which justify courses of politicalaction in the name of a supposedly invariant nature or ineluctablesocial imperatives (capitalist or otherwise). More subtly, becausethe production of nature approach is anthropomorphic it alsoenables a position from which the fate of nature/s can beconsidered seriously without declining into a naturalisticecocentrism. It is possible to express concern over those thingswe routinely call natural while still remaining necessarilyanthropomorphic yet without being anthropocentric(i.e. makingpeople the only or pre-eminent concern of politics). It seems tome that this is what, at the broadest level, the production ofnature approach achieves. Thirdly, the production of nature

approach also thereby tempers the melancholic romanticism ofthose radical ecocentrists who decry natures destruction, whilealso embracing some of technocentrisms optimism as to the




28/33

potentially liberating effects of transforming nature/s. In thisrespect, the favoured motif of the production of nature/s approachis creative destruction, a semantically complex notion whichMarx used to capture the two-sided character of capitalist

development.24

This brings me to a final point, which concernsthe value-judgements which are necessarily built into all appraisalsof nature-capital relations. If, as Harvey (above) seeks to maketheoretically explicit, some productions of nature are beneficialto human-kind while others are destructive for humanity and/ornature/s this raises complex questions as to what is consideredbeneficial and destructive.25 These questions cannot beanswered in general terms (absolute or historical) for what isconsidered beneficial in one locale at a particular point in time

might be considered destructive in another. The conceptualresources with which to distinguish the two kinds will arise fromcontextualisedanalyses of capital-nature relations in particulartimes and places as they affect different constituencies, not theplenary judgements of dualistic ecoMarxisms, the indiscriminatemysticism of deep green strands of ecocentrism or the universalistarrogance of Copernican strands of technocentrism.

Conclusion

I have made three main arguments in this essay. First, that for overa century Marxian writings on nature have been strung outbetween the polar positions of naturalism or constructionism;second, that these writings are thereby informed by dualisticassumptions also found in many bourgeois and radical ecocentristperspectives on nature; and third, that a conception of thecapitalist production of nature offers rich ontological, theoreticaland normative resources for a supple, non-dichotomous Marxianconception of the nature-capital nexus. Despite this latterargument, I do not see the production of nature argument as afaitaccompli, which, like some Hegelian aufhebung, stands as thecrowning achievement of over a century of inquisitions into theMarx-nature question. But I do think that future debates onMarxism and nature will have to explicitly address the problemsof dualistic thinking in pursuit of third way approaches to

nature in the twenty first century that are both/and rather thaneither/or. Still, even if others follow the lead of Smith andHarvey and successfully negotiate the antinomies of the previous




29/33

Marx-nature debates, at least one serious and pressing problemremains. This returns me to the question raised in the introductionabout political practice and the gap between the dry, academicnature of most Marx-nature debatesof which this essay is an

exampleand the visceral, engaged nature of environmentalpolitics. Given the counter-intuitive nature of its core thesesand the well-known difficulties academic Marxists have had inthese neo-conservative/neo-liberal times in reaching out from theivory tower, communicating the production of nature view toactivistsand also, reciprocally, learning from grass-rootsorganisingwill be a truly daunting task. Yet it is a task whichneeds urgently to be undertaken because the examination ofbasicand usually taken-for-grantedassumptions informing

our understanding of nature is of more than merely academicsignificance. Rather, it has to be central to any present and futuregrass-roots ecoMarxism.

______________________________

I am grateful to Ted Benton, Bettina Lange, Les Levidow and Mike Quiggin forhelping me improve an earlier version of this paper.

______________________________

1. I am thinking here, for example, of James OConnors (1998)Natural Causesand Paul Burketts (1999)Marx and Nature.

2. Let me stress that I am not placing allpermutations of green thought andpolitics together under one ecocentric umbrella. My criticisms of greenthought, which are necessarily broad brush and schematic in a theoreticalessay like the present one, are aimed mainly at the deep green end of thespectrum, hence my use of the term radical ecocentric. For a more detailedconsideration of attitudes towards nature see Dryzek (1998).

3. And also, of course, because of Marxisms wider unpopularity after thecollapse of Soviet and Eastern Bloc communism. The equation of Marxism

and actually existing communism has been especially damaging for Marxistswriting and remaining active after the Fall because the public, press andgovernments worldwide seem unable to think that Marxism can be anythingotherthan a totalitarian ideology.

4. Best illustrated, in recent years, in Paul Burketts several careful andscholarly essays on the ecological significance of capitalist value.

5. For more on Latour and overcoming dualisms see Murdoch (1997a, 1997b).6. I should also note here a parallel, but distinct, Marxian literature on the the

ways natures limits are invoked by modern science. Notable writers inthis field are Robert Young, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin.

7. Note that in this essay the term constructionism refers to material-physicalconstructionism rather than the discursive constructionism which hasbeen de rigeurin cultural studies this last decade or more.


Acknowledgement

Notes



30/33

8. I should also say that I only review the debates in the Anglophone Marxisttradition in this essay. To this extent, I am, of course, ignoring a whole swatheof non-English speaking literature on Marx and nature.

9. Which, in practice, usually means particular segments of humanity with thepower to enjoy the full benefits of capitalist industrialisation.

10. I put this term in scare quotes because I do not think it is possible to say thatcapitalism is ecologically destructive in any absolute sense which can bedefined in non-anthropological ways. Rather, destructive appropriationsof nature can only be defined in relation to historically and geographicallyspecific social appraisals of what is useful and valuable in nature on economicand/or moral and/or aesthetic grounds.

11. Naturalism is, of course, a semantically complex term with a rich andvaried history of usage both within Marxism and without. In this essay I usethe term in a deliberately general way to designate any body of thought whichposits a nominally separate or independent natural realm which eitherunderpins, constrains or enables a nominally separate realm of society.

12. Such a desire still animates some contributions on the Marx-nature question.For instance, Burkett (1996), as the title of his otherwise excellent essaysuggests, proposes to clear up Some Common Misconceptions AboutNature and Marxs Critique of Political Economy. Here the term mis-conception clearly implies an ostensibly correct view which it is Burkettsintention to establish. Quite why Marxists still feel compelled to searchfor Marxs true meaning on this and other issues eludes me. It surelymisses the point, which is to read Marx in ways which provide theoretically

coherent and empirically relevant analyses of contemporary capitalism(cf. Althusser and Balibar [1970] on reading Marx).13. More detailed interpretations of Engels on nature are Parsons (1977) and

Benton (1996).14. For more on Schmidts reading of Marx on nature see Smith (1984: ch. 1) and

Burkett (1997).15. This, then, was a kind of natural humanism, if you will, as opposed to a

historical humanism produced as the contingent effect of social relationsglobally unifying an otherwise disparate working class constituency.

16. I do not, for example, consider the work of John Bellamy Foster or Paul

Burkett.17. This is not, of course, to say that the mode of production does not matter:it clearly does insofar as given technologies may be utilised in different waysand degreesand with different consequencesdepending upon whichforces and relations of production they are embedded in.

18. As Smith (1996: 49) puts it, nature itself is not much of a Marxist category.19. Note that, in making this argument, I concur with the spirit (though not

the letter) of Burketts (1998) critique of Benton. I say spirit rather thanletter because I do not think it quite right to characterise Benton asultimately neo-Malthusian. In deed, broadly speaking, I think there is

much in common between my objections to dualistic Marxian thinking aboutnature and Burketts own ongoing project to avoid the antinomies ofnaturalism and hyper-constructionism.




31/33

20. There are, I should note, signs in Bentons more recent work that he is aliveto, and has sought to address, the residual dualism informing his thinkingon nature: see Benton (1994).

21. But see also Redclift (1987) and Smith and OKeefe (1980, 1985) for relatedtheoretical reflections..

22. I should say, though, that empirical exemplifications of the production ofnature thesis do exist. Though he does not phrase his work in Smithsterms, it seems to me that Kloppenburgs (1988) germinal First The Seediseffectively a case study of natures production.

23. Though the point is that this materiality is contingent and time-spacespecific. In other words, the limits of a particular environment in aparticular period can only be defined relative to the specific politicaleconomic arrangements it is part of.

24. In an important and sobering essay in theNew Left Review, Richard Smith(1998) uses this notion to describe the awesome environmental consequencesof Chinas ongoing transition from communism to capitalism.

25. Moreover, David Harvey (1996) has recently made the important pointthat many socially produced environments and landscapes can only berelinquished at great social and ecological cost because they are so much apart of everyday life in a capitalist world economy. This is why, he argues,a future socialism cannot be based on back-to-nature, small scale settlementthinking of the kind more radical ecocentrists advocate.

_______________________________

Althusser, L. and E. Balibar (1970) Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster. New LeftBooks: London.Altvater, E. (1993) The Future of the Market, trans. P. Camiller. Verso, London.Benton, T. (1989) Marxism and Natural Limits, inNew Left Review178: 5181.__________ (1990) On the Limits of Malleability, in Capitalism, Nature,

Socialism 4: 68-71.__________ (1991a) The Malthusian Challenge, in P. Osborne (ed.) Socialism

and the Limits of Liberalism. Verso, London: 24169.__________ (1991b) Biology and Social Science, in Sociology 25: 129.__________ (1992) Ecology, Socialism and the Mastery of Nature, in New

Left Review194: 5572.__________ (1994) Biology and social theory, in T. Benton and M. Redclift (eds)

Social Theory and the Global Environment. Routledge, London: 2849.__________ (ed) (1996) The Greening of Marxism. Guilford, New York.__________ (1996) Engels and the Politics of Nature, in C. Arthur (ed.)Engels

Today. Macmillan, Basingstoke.Barnett, C. (1995) Why Theory?, inEconomic Geography 71: 42735.Burkett, P. (1996) Some Common Misconceptions About Nature and Marxs

Critique of Political Economy, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7: 5780.__________ (1997) Nature in Marx Reconsidered, in Organization and

Environment10: 16483.__________ (1998) Labour, Ecoregulation and Value, in Historical Materialism

3: 11944.


References



32/33

__________ (1999)Marx and Nature. St. Martins Press., New York.Castree, N. (1995) The Nature of Produced Nature, inAntipode 27: 1247.Collier, A. (1994) Critical Realism. Verso, London.Dryzek, J. (1998)Earth Politics. Oxford University Press: Oxford.Ehrlich, P. (1970) The Population Bomb. Ballantine Books, New York.

Engels, F. (1956) The Dialectics of Nature. Moscow.Escobar, A. (1996) Constructing Nature, in R. Peet and M. Watts (eds)

Liberation Ecologies. Routledge, London: 4668.Fitzsimmons, M. and D. Goodman (1998) Incorporating Nature, in B. Braun

and N. Castree (eds) Remaking Reality. Routledge: New York: 194220.Geras, N. (1980)Marx and Human Nature. Verso, London.Grundmann, R. (1991a)Marxism and Ecology. Oxford University Press, Oxford.__________ (1991b) The Ecological Challenge to Marxism, inNew Left Review

193: 10320.Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, in Science 162: 124348.__________ (1996) Living Within Limits. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Harvey, D. (1974) Population, Resources and the Ideology of Science, in

Economic Geography 50: 25677.Hazelrigg, L. (1993) Marx and the Meter of Nature, in Rethinking Marxism 6:

104122.__________ (1996)Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell,

London & New York.Katz, C. (1998) Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and

the Preservation of Nature, in B. Braun and N. Castree (eds) Remaking

Reality: Nature at the Millennium. Routledge, London: 4664.Kloppenburg, J. (1988) First The Seed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, Mass.Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith.

Blackwell, Oxford.Marx, K. (1975) The Holy Family, in Collected Works 4. International Publishers,

New York.McIntyre, R. (1992) Theories of Uneven Development and Social Change, in

Rethinking Marxism 5: 75105.

Meadows, D. et al. (1972) The Limits to Growth. Universe Books, New York.Meek, R. (ed) (1955)Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb. University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley.

Murdoch, J. (1997a) Inhuman/Nonhuman/Human, in Society and Space 15:73156.

__________ (1997b) Towards a Geography of Heterogenous Associations,in Progress in Human Geography 21: 32137.

OConnor, J. (1989a) Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 1: 1138.

__________ (1989b) Political Economy and Ecology of Socialism and

Capitalism, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 3: 93106.__________ (1989c) Uneven and Combined Development and Ecological

Crisis: A Theoretical Introduction, in Race and Class 30: 111.




33/33

__________ (1998)Natural Causes. Guilford, New York.OConnor, M. (1994) Is Capitalism Sustainable?Guilford, New York.Ollman, B. (1971)Alienation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.__________ (1993) Dialectical Investigations. Routledge, New York.Parsons, H. (1977)Marx and Engels on Ecology. Greenwood Press, Westport.

Redclift, M. (1987) The Production of Nature and the Reproduction of theSpecies, inAntipode 19: 22230.

Ross, A. (1994) The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life. Verso, London.Schmidt, A. (1971) The Concept of Nature in Marx. New Left Books, London.Serres, M. (1987) Statues. Francois Bourin, Paris.Simon, J. (1997) The Ultimate Resource II. Princeton University Press, Princeton.Smith, N. (1980) Symptomatic Silence in Althusser: The Concept of Nature and

the Unity of Science, in Science and Society 44: 5881.__________ (1984) Uneven Development. Blackwell, Oxford.__________ (1986) On the Necessity of Uneven Development, in International

Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10: 87104.__________ (1996) The Production of Nature, in G. Robertson et al. (eds.)

FutureNatural. Routledge, London: 3554.__________ (1998) Nature at the Millennium: Production and Re-Enchantment,

in B. Braun and N. Castree (eds.) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium.Routledge, London: 27185.

Smith, N. and P. OKeefe (1980) Geography, Marx and the Concept of Nature,inAntipode 12: 309.

__________ (1985) Postscript: The Production of Nature, inAntipode 17: 88.

Smith, R. (1998) Creative Destruction: Capitalist Development and ChinasEnvironment, inNew Left Review216: 341.Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies. Verso: London.Soper, K. (1991) Greening Prometheus, in P. Osborne (ed.) Socialism and the

Limits of Liberalism. Verso, London: 21793.Stanley, J. (1997-8) Marxs Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Nature, in Science

and Society 61: 44973.Swyngedouw, E. (1996) The City as a Hybrid, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

7: 6580.__________ (1999) Modernity and Hybridity, inAnnals of the Association of

American Geographers 89: 44365.Timparano, S. (1975) On Materialism. New Left Books, London.Whatmore, S. and S. Boucher (1992) Bargaining With Nature, in Transactions

of the Institute of British Geographers 18: 16678.Williams, R. (1980) Ideas of Nature, in Problems in Materialism and Culture.

Verso, London: 67102.Wiltgen, R. (1981) Marx and Engels on Malthus and Population, in Quarterly

Review of Economics and Business 21: 10726.______________________________


capital y clase.pdf

Documents