Marx: Humans ‘In and Against’ Nature
Sanjay Roy
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USE values are created by labour and nature. But capital relations attach value to products that are being produced for the purpose of creating surplus. Production in capitalism is production of surplus value and this involves a process of appropriating labour and nature. The ecological imbalance as climate change, pollution, depletion of natural resources, extinction of species, destruction of wilderness or population growth are crucial issues for the survival of living bodies present and future.
But capitalism is a system that can only sense ‘eternal present’ a drive towards immediate gains in the form of profit. It is a system in which exchange values dominate use values. It is not only important to produce something useful but also marketable. It should be useful for others and when the society is driven by commodity production it is important to define the terms of exchange between commodities. Terms of exchange requires comparable quantities, that is the concreteness of the product should be convertible through equal measures of quantities. This is done by abstracting the concreteness of each different forms of labour into what Marx called ‘abstract labour’. This ‘abstract’ does not imply any cognitive abstraction as some speculative idea devoid of any material existence, but a process which is very much real and we experience in our day to day life. It makes different things that we buy and sell comparable in terms of quantities. Essentially it captures the interdependence of human beings although reified as a relationship between buyers and sellers of commodities.This is the ‘abstract socially necessary labour’ required to produce a particular commodity that defines the value of the product which is always a creation of labour. The values get expression through the universal medium money and prices are attached to every commodity.
The unending thirst for profit is essentially a process of appropriation of unpaid labour on the one hand and on the other by appropriating nature, a ‘free gift’, through private property. The destruction of forest to capitalism is a destruction of wealth but not of value because it is not being created by human labour and if it is not propertied, it doesn’t have a price either. Therefore, it doesn’t impact the calculus of profit as it had not entered into the cost conditions of production.
NATURE AND
CIRCULATING CAPITAL
Expropriation of nature is intrinsically ‘rational’ in capitalism. The process of profit making involves a chain of phases which is the circuit of capital beginning with money or investment, then raw materials or inputs are bought, workers are being hired, production takes place which is the phase of the production of surplus value through exploiting labour and then it has to be sold involving advertisers, merchants, salespersons to realise surplus value as profits. Marx showed that with rising machines and technology driven by competition, the organic composition of capital increases, but as surplus value is only generated by exploiting labour, retaining the same level of profit every time requires infusion of higher doses of capital. This leads to declining rate of profitability.
One of the counteracting forces of this declining profit rate is reducing costs of raw materials which can be done by intensive use of natural resources. Now if efficient production implies deriving higher return with a given set of inputs then intensive use of energy and natural resources would increase profitability and would turn the production to be efficient. Hence by capitalist logic expropriation of natural resources is a rational act of the economic agent. Therefore, private interests with a profit motive would not be able to protect environment and resolve the climate change issue. Capitalism tries to address this issue by taxing the polluters or by fixing a cost to ecological beds. But exchange value or its monetary expression entails a process of exchange that necessitates a price expression on the basis of equivalence of value. Buyers and sellers in a market come as owners and sellers of their product but the gifts of nature, air or water, wind or mountains are not products of labour and hardly anyone can claim to own them.
True, that some price can be ascertained for land by comparing with similar patches of land or by establishing property rights on land and water or on a park may fetch rents because of the privileged access to propertied resources, but ecology and environment are too large for capitalism to handle through the metrics of price and so the logic of capital actually creates a metabolic rift as the rule of profit facilitates ecological destruction. Capitalism can realise the danger of climate change and ecological crisis but its intrinsic motive of profit maximisation does not allow it to restrict the pace of using natural resources or energy nor does it have the appropriate tool to measuring the value of ecological goods.
IS DE-GROWTH
THE ANSWER?
The ecological challenge is sometimes viewed from a perspective that idealises a pristine form of nature and a referent ecological balance of an unknown distant past. The underlying assumption is there had been an ideal ecological balance which is being distorted by the growth centric economic development and therefore ‘de-growth’ seems to be the answer. But human beings not only exist in nature they consciously change their surroundings; they act upon nature by understanding and assimilating the processes.
Marx defined nature as the ‘inorganic body’ and addressed the engagement of human beings with nature as a dialectical process. Humans are both ‘in and against’ nature. Other beings couldn’t change their habitation because they couldn’t act upon their surroundings consciously and they take it as it is. Therefore, acting upon nature and consciously changing it in their favour by human labour had been the distinctive feature of humans which could put them far ahead of other animals. Idealising a scenario where humans would be worshiping nature and not acting upon it to enhance productivity and well-being of human beings along with their inorganic body is not only an absurd proposition but also suicidal.
Augmenting productive forces and mutually constitutive production relations defines the progress of history. But the notion of ‘progress’ has never been static neither it is trans-historical. In capitalism, progress as development of productive forces is primarily driven by the interest of making profit. Natural processes are analysed, assimilated and appropriated to serve the purpose of capital accumulation.
The rule of capital facilitates an unending thirst of accumulation for the producers and a corresponding greed for commodities as consumers. Wealth and possession of commodities defines the status of human beings in capitalism. But this is not the only way to understand life and engage with nature. Progress and development can be defined as a means to achieve better life for all the people of the current and future generations. Mastery of nature in that case would not mean colonising nature by human beings where they are seen as separated from each other but a radically different engagement when humans consider nature as part of their extended existence.
Loot and plunder of natural resources would be replaced by a responsible and sustainable use of such resources, a path of human progress more dependent on renewables. The idea of better life and progress changes so also the priorities of technological development and research. Development of productive forces assumes a different meaning with the changed purpose. This is possible only in a society where the society as a whole owns and controls the means of production, in which social concerns prevail over private profit motives and there are adequate institutional mechanisms in place that ensure actual control of the direct producers. This is the idea of socialism which Marx defined as the society of freely ‘associated producers’ and their communities.
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