Marx and the Environment

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.