Reconsidering Some Ecological Criticisms of Marx’s Value Analysis

Abstract

The preceding chapter showed that Marx’s value analysis has much to say about the social roots of capitalism’s environmental problems, and that the critics who fault Marx for not ascribing value to nature should redirect their criticisms to capitalism itself. Generally speaking, these critics fail to appreciate the historical and social-relational aspect of Marx’s theory—that value as a specifically capitalist form of wealth does not represent Marx’s normative valuation of nature’s intrinsic worth (e.g., in terms of aesthetic and other use values). In this respect, Marx’s critics could have saved much trouble by studying the following passage: To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange-value. Since exchange- value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange. (Marx, 1967a, I, 82)