Nature, Labor, and Capitalist Production

Abstract

The common ground of Marx’s materialism and Marx’s analysis of capitalism is that all societies must allocate their labor among productive, that is, need-satisfying, activities entailing appropriation from nature. This allocation involves specific social relations in and through which each portion of society’s total work-time is integrated into a division of labor enmeshed with natural conditions.¹ Under capitalism, the division of labor takes the form of market (commodity and money) relations, based on the historically extreme social separation of the human producers from necessary conditions of production. Marx’s analysis explains how this separation, by enabling labor and its natural and social conditions to be developed as conditions of competitive capital accumulation, leads to an historically unprecedented growth of their wealth-producing powers. At the same time, Marx emphasizes capital’s tendency to plunder and vitiate its own human and natural conditions of existence. Chapters 6 and 7 establish capitalism’s antagonism with nature from the standpoint of the value form of commodities, money, and capital. The present chapter focuses on the basic relations between workers’ social separation from production conditions on the one hand, and the historical specificity of the natural conditions and limits of capitalist production on the other. Since these relations themselves implicate the conversion of use value into a condition and material vehicle of exchange value, we begin with a brief exposition of the necessary basis of generalized commodity production in the class relations of capitalism. This will also help set the stage for the value analysis.